The Lady in the Wall
by Myshu
Summary: The last days of Guardia's finest knight and the last words of Doctor LEA, of things not meant to be and everyone else's happy endings. This is what comes to those marked with the blight. Phoenix Chronicles, Cross-AU.
1. Voices

A/N: Here's that follow-up I threatened to write. Some little birds told me to do it.

This story is part of my Phoenix Chronicles, so Trigger = canon and Cross = not so much, although I'm not afraid to borrow a few names and concepts. It takes place shortly after _The Diary of Doctor LEA_, but I'm gonna spoil the hell out of that for you in the preface so you don't have to torture yourself readin' it.

This time I'm not going to push the whole thing in first person—style-wise, it's going to be more like LEA's Diary set to _Prince of Thieves_. So, fair warning: violence, sex, crude discourse, gallows humor, small fluffy animals swearing... the works. Enjoy!

- **Preface** -

_**I am impeccably retarded.**_

_At this rate, it's no wonder Jerad won't know my real name. I must have some prophetic tendency to shoot myself in the foot, because I burned the diary. Not on purpose, mind you! It's never on purpose, is it? I'm sure it's no surprise, either. 'Oh look, that crazy little fire starter blew up something else today. Amazing she hasn't burned her whole house down by now.' Not that anyone from town was watching this time, but that's what they'd say._

_I don't even have a good story for it. I dropped it in the bathtub and thought I could dry it out with some magic. __**Brilliantly**__ retarded (why do I have books in the bathroom, again? Don't ask me_—_my house is like the library of the damned, where lost books go to die.) I'm sure Magus could have done it without even breaking his perma-scowl, much less a sweat. I don't know why he always has to think he's better than everyone, just because he knows more magic tricks._

_Pardon me, I'm on another tangent. If you read my other diary you'd know I do that a lot, except you can't because __**I burned the stupid thing.**_

_Okay, that's enough self-flagellation for now. I have to think positive. Fortunately, it wasn't THE diary_—_I would have to go bashing some heads if anything ever happened to that one_—_but everything that happened with Ramezia, Free Bandwidth, Heckran and the gate shrines... poof, it's gone. I'll have to write it all over._

_I'm so pissed at myself, I'm exhausted. I don't know if I have the stamina to recall the entire ordeal from scratch, and the sketchier the details get, the more it's going to look like I made it all up. Whenever I think back, it gets a little hard to believe, myself, so I know how it must look to a skeptic. Trust me, I'm a creative genius when it comes to machines, but not when it comes to storytelling. There is no way I could have fabricated those events_—_but what proof is my word alone? Therein lies the dilemma of this whole exercise. Still, I'm determined to keep a written record, even if the rest of the world will never believe it_—_or find it, if my luck with flammable bookkeeping holds up._

_It was just easier to write when everything was fresh on my mind; what I really can't believe is that it's been two years, already. Well, here goes nothing: I'll give the abridged version for now. I'll try to make it brief, for my own sake._

_My name is Lucca Elaine Ashtear, as you know, and I'm a mechanical engineer. I specialize in robots, although locally I'm more famous for my teleportation device_—_but I've already written a whole book on that little adventure (which has NOT been set on fire. Miraculously), so I won't rehash it. I learned not too long ago that in the far future, all the credit for my brilliant inventions goes to an unknown 'Dr. LEA,' which I found kind of cool once I stopped being bitter about it_—_adds a nice flair of mystique to my work. As long as the research itself is preserved, I can't really hold the future against its sources (or lack thereof.)_

_So it happened that one rainy summer three years after that Telepod incident, I got a surprise visit from Magus, perhaps the last person in history I ever wanted to see again. My life changed so drastically after that bizarre meeting, I almost can't wrap my head around it sometimes. Or maybe it really didn't change too much_—_that could be my problem._

_I live by myself, now, in the same big old house I grew up in. I lost my parents to a gang of Mystics led by Lord Heckran, who was raiding our home for the Sun Stone we kept in the attic. The Mystics were working for a sorceress from the twenty-first century named Ramezia, who had restored the time gates with the help of a group of temporal distortion researchers called Free Bandwidth. Their leader was someone named Jerad, who was a nice enough guy, just horribly gullible for someone so intelligent (and a hell of a doormat.) Ramezia tricked both the Mystics and Free Bandwidth into setting up the annihilation of all land-based life on the planet via a devastating water magic spell called the __Vitraevos__. Magus got a little too close to her plot, and that's when the rest of our old time-traveling gang got dragged into the mess._

_I'd like to say it was as fun as our last adventure, but it was only just as crazy. We stopped Ramezia from washing away humanity (naturally!) but there were casualties, some of them close. It's too much to think about, sometimes... so that's why I don't. Call it callous and unhealthy if you like, but I call it being practical. Magus was right about one thing: the dead have all the time in the world, and we don't. I know Mom and Dad would want me to make the most of the time I have left. I'm only sorry I couldn't... It doesn't matter now. I have to move on._

_The experience wasn't a total loss, besides. We met a race from another world_—_two, actually. One of those aliens was a demi-dragon woman named Mishu (a highly improbable extra-terrestrial life form, but...) She taught my friends the __gi'ira__, or 'talent of the beast' in her alien language. It's similar to magic in execution, only it allows us to transform into a unique 'inner animal' that's supposed to represent a part of our souls. Mine is a bird_—_some type of heron, as far as I can discern. Marle calls me Pigeon, for the noise I make in that form. ...It's less stupid than it sounds. Funny, though; I used to think Daemonism was a load of bunk. Then again, I thought the same about magic._

_If any of us benefited the most from the __gi'ira__, it was Frog_—_although I should call him Glenn now, since he's a human being again. That beast talent managed to lift the frog curse and give back his human body (alternately, he's a dog, not a smaller frog, as Marle was about to guess.) We were really happy for him, and I might add that he is, in fact, drop-dead gorgeous (his human self, not the dog. Just wanted to make that clear.) I think his new look will really turn his life around_—_not that he needed the help, right? Frog has the thickest skin of anybody I know (literally_—_hah! I'm a card.) I always admired the guy for being able to handle anything, even if he gets a little broody at times. I wonder what he's up to these days (or should I say 'those days'? Talking about the past in present tense always gets convoluted.) Really, I just wish I could have been there to see the look on Leene's face when he went back to her._

_Anyway, it was great seeing everyone again, even if I missed a chance to visit Robo. I could shoot myself for that, although I was understandably distracted at the time. I hope you can forgive me, old friend. Of course, all things must come to an end, and once everyone went back to their home times, we demolished Ramezia's gate shrines. It's a pity that such a magnificent and enigmatic device had to be destroyed thanks to one genocidal maniac mucking around through time, but what can I say? This is why we can't have nice things._

_As for me, I went back to this big empty house... although perhaps I lied about living alone._

_I guess this is the part where I start to sound genuinely crazy..._

**- 1. Voices -**

_9/13/1005:_

_As of today, I've been working for Mr. Varg for exactly two years. I have the date circled on the calendar like some kind of perverse anniversary._

_Curse you, Bobsled-o-Matic._

_- 1 -  
_

She practically lived in that shop.

She realized that one day when she tallied the time up, both on the clock and off: fifty-five to sixty hours a week, which is nearly a third of one. Considering an odd statistic she knew, that the average person spends a third of their life in bed (and that she would spend a hell of a lot more, if given too much opportunity), it wasn't a great logical leap to say that she spent the majority of her waking hours in that shop.

"...ey...awake...'ere?"

That damn shop. She might've felt better about it if she owned the place, but instead she toiled like an indentured servant under the heel of Thaddius L. Varg, the most wretched miser in the port town of Truce, if not the whole kingdom of Guardia. He was offensive at a competitive level, seeming to make sport of every negative quality he had. Had a foul mouth, tobacco-stained teeth, grizzled grey hair, a bad leg, a lecherous eye, a sour disposition, and a single-minded belief that females weren't fit to do any kind of man's work. She hated him passionately, nearly to the exclusion of all her former nemeses—including the ones that tried to eradicate mankind.

After spending enough time with Mr. Varg, she almost preferred mass extinction.

"Oi, Ash..."

Granted, many of the hours whittled away in that shop were of her own devising, ever since Mr. Varg let her close up at night. It was her fault that she lingered long after her boss took off, until the lights in town died down and the moon was peering through the back room's lonesome skylight. She hated working for Varg, but that didn't mean she hated working. There was always something to do, machines to fix, ideas to mold into reality—she loved making things. She was a creator, thriving off the caprices of her imagination, and with all the tools and scrap material that shop had to offer, she never ran out of clever inventions. She came from a long line of blacksmiths, after all, and her father taught her everything he knew.

Then he died, him and her mother... but that was two summers ago. She didn't like to count her losses. At least her inheritance didn't leave her homeless, but without any income she very shortly needed a job, something to keep the pantry from running dry. That's when Mr. Varg took her in, although it was more a matter of shame than of necessity. At the time her father died, he was paying off a debt that she had incurred with Varg thanks to one of her reckless devices (her written record of the incident only states, 'sleds were not made to fly.') It was only appropriate that she take up that misbegotten yolk in his stead, for her family's honor—if nothing else mattered.

"...Ashtear..."

Of course, getting cooped up a pawn shop between heaps of loaned tools and broken appliances while a cranky old man cracked a whip from the front counter wasn't her ideal recourse, nor was it her only one. She still had friends in good, high places—Guardia Castle, as a matter of fact. One of them was none other than Princess Nadia, and the other was engaged to said princess, so it wasn't hard to pull a royal string or two whenever she wished.

However, when she was offered a position with the castle defense's research and development crew, she respectfully declined. She had nothing against working for the royal family, but... Supposing it was pride, that was something she wouldn't even admit to her diary, her closest confidant. Pride could be obstinate like that. Besides, she had to leave room on those pages for regret, even if she didn't like to dwell on all those pleasant 'what if''s, either. A robot once taught her better, and he ended up being a better friend than anyone she ever met in school. That was why she preferred the company of machines, really; people weren't as simple.

The work was stiff, dirty and stifling, but it was her best excuse and distraction—from everything. All told, when the day was over, why bother going home? She didn't have anything waiting for her there, except a bed that was often too cold in a draughty old house. Sleep was overrated, anyway.

...Except when it was on the clock, and then it was painfully underrated.

"Ashtear!"

The tip of her pencil snapped against the rough grain of the desk (it was more of a bench than a desk, tacked up against the wall with some roughshod nails) as Lucca jumped in her seat. She then slumped onto her elbows and rubbed her eyes as the bleary, rusty palette of the back room blotted out a vision of some fairer time and place, one she would only ever see again in her dreams. She was going to forget what the great outdoors looked like, at this rate.

She cast a dreary look at the notepaper she just smudged, searching for where her coherent string of thought tapered into a less-than-conscious one. Now awake and twice as miserable for it, she fixed her glasses on her nose, spun around on the creaky old barstool (the sorts of leftover furniture that found its home in the shop—in various stages of disrepair—was nothing short of amazing) and shot back with an acerbic bite that was most ladylike, "_What_."

Mr. Varg's voice was like a crow's song, ricocheting across the store and through the curtain hanging in the doorframe between the front and back rooms. "You fix that damn toaster yet, or are ya slackin' off again?"

Lucca glanced to the wreckage on her countertop that was once an electric toaster. It was hideous even in its original state, painted with black-and-yellow stripes and checkers. She dearly hoped there wasn't a kitchen out there to match it, but the laws of probability weren't doing her any favors lately. As it was, she pushed aside her sketchbook and dragged the heap of metal closer, making the effort to swear, "Cripes! I'm working on it..."

She could hear Mr. Varg uttering around his smoke pipe, "Well Mr. Yancy's coming back this afternoon, so you better get your shit together in time for 'im. I don't pay you to piss n' sleep sittin' down all day."

By its nature, a pawn shop dealt in collateral loans and used merchandise, and Varg's was no different—until he recognized the special skills of his new hire. That's when he expanded the shop's functions to include repairs, an odious task that fell to his young assistant, so long as watches and jewelry weren't involved. Even though she had small fingers and a knack for soldering, Lucca was forbidden to even look sideways at the jewelry. ('Get yer grubby monkey hands away from that showcase. Tampering with my shelves—what're you doing up front? I told you to stay in the back. Ain't no business the likes'a some girl meddling with fine gold. Gold is for proper ladies. Y'can't have any, so feck off,' he once rebuked, and she retreated behind the curtain in a huff.)

Such was their rapport; she was used to it. Lucca sighed and got back to work, resisting the urge to leave a note on Mr. Yancy's redemption slip with instructions for fixing it himself, starting with the line, _Insert a fork..._

_'You'd have to pull it out of Varg's ass, first.'_

Lucca snorted under her breath and then bit her tongue—she swore not to humor the voice cracking little black jokes in her head. There were two, actually, that she had distinguished from the ramblings of her own psyche, and sometimes she heard them when her mind was most vulnerable. She wasn't crazy—she refused to be weak in any mental capacity. Maybe it was stress, stirring up nightmares in the daylight... She thought too much, sometimes, about everything. It just didn't help that those creepy voices knew a little too much.

_'When're you going to tell that old man to stuff it, anyway?'_

"When I've paid him off..." she murmured into the jammed slot of the toaster, and then winced at the distraction. She would _not_ be caught talking to thin air again, even if she was the only one around to catch it—then again, in the past few years she'd made that oath enough times to discourage a saint.

_'You're full of crap, you know that? He's never going to quit docking your pay for that roof. I bet it's not even about the money anymore. Old man just wants to screw you.'_

There was a screw behind the spring latch that didn't look like the right fit. She tried to wedge it free with a flat tip. "I wouldn't put it past him..." She stopped and bit her tongue again. She was going to get a welt if this kept up.

The voice took on a teasing, sultry ring. _'In more ways than one, if you know what I mean.'_

Lucca had a hard time looking straight at Mr. Varg's hoary, gnarled figure under normal circumstances, so the onslaught of—extremely, hideously unwanted—imagery was so jarring that she wrenched the screw out of the socket and straight into her face. It bounced off her glasses with a sharp _pingk_. "Ah—damnit!"

_'Gwahahahaha!'_

She recoiled from the bench and checked the scratched lens—fortunately, it wasn't cracked. "Son of a—why don't you go pester your brother?" she snapped, louder than intended, and then threw a rueful glance at the curtain. Varg either hadn't noticed the outburst or hadn't cared.

The two voices had distinct personalities that she learned to recognize over time (the other brother had a cooler, more serious disposition and a smoother voice, if a little unctuous at times), yet the sibling tidbit was the only personal identifier she'd come to know—she had been refused their names. Lucca had been tempted to ask if they were really related, but delving into the family history of a couple of aural hallucinations felt like swimming a little too far off the deep end.

_'He's out. Why, my company isn't good enough for you?'_

Even after several years, Lucca still suffered from the hope that ignoring the black voices would make them go away. She was only lucky that this time it worked; after a determined minute of silence on her part, the intruding voice departed.

It hardly took an hour to patch up Mr. Yancy's toaster, and the man of interest picked it up after lunch (peanut butter and jelly sandwich, again. If asked, Lucca would say that one can't go wrong with the classics. Nobody asked, anyway.) Afterward, she picked up her notes and found her latest idea: a schematic for a toaster robot. She had built one before, but that model met a tragic end, and Lucca had always wanted to try another. There was a toy piano collecting termites on the 'broken' shelf in the back whose ceramic keys would make perfect feet...

("Wha...think?")

Engrossed in her latest project, Lucca wasn't paying much attention to her surroundings when she heard it: indistinct scuffling with a hollow pitch. The noise trickled into the room like water down a storm drain, and if she didn't know any better, she'd swear it was coming from the _wall_.

("...eah...gonna be our...crash pad, word.")

It was a human voice. She was haplessly familiar with _inhuman_ voices, so the process of elimination helped. These new voices were—as far as she could tell—detached from psychotic speculation. She climbed onto the bench (if it could handle a couple hundred pounds of engine parts it could support a scrawny girl, although she cursed when that vagrant screw stuck her thigh—at least she found where it went), took off her helmet and held her ear to the brick wall.

("Nice. This is better than Rick's.")  
("I know it. More shade, less open, closer to the street—it's tight.")

Higher? No, lower, to the left... It had a tin twang that she followed off the bench and into a corner, where a sheet of plywood was tacked to the wall with the same snaggle-toothed finesse as the bench. It snapped away with one tug, revealing a cubby hole with a... stovepipe?

("Real tight.")  
("Just hope we don't get run outta here too, haha.")

It was just the pipe, no stove, although a lighter circle of dust on the floor suggested there might have been one, once upon a time. The metal shaft scaled the wall up to the ceiling and then abruptly turned into the bricks, vanishing at some point on the outside. The voices leaked out the open end like a dripping tap.

("Shit, nobody cares. All that's back here is garbage and rats.")

It was coming from the alley next to the shop, then. Once in a great while she heard cats fighting out there, but this was the first time human beings invaded the lot. Rather than covering the hole back up, Lucca shrugged and decided to make the best of it. It was a cheap novelty, like listening through two cans on a string, and heavens forbid Mr. Varg let her listen to a _real_ radio, so this might be the closest thing to entertainment she was going to get.

("Hey com'on man, gimme some chalk.")  
("What? Wha'do I look like I carry fuckin' chalk on me for?")  
("Gonna write up this wall, man! Gotta mark our territory.")

It couldn't get worse; as Lucca sat back down and looked for her smallest screwdriver, she realized—to her chagrin—that she recognized these people.

("Whatever, man. You're just gonna hike your leg and put your name on every damn thing, and then Gary's gonna come around when you're not looking and write 'swings both ways' after 'em.")  
Gary indeed found that suggestion amusing. ("'Charlie Laydel swings both ways,' hahaha.")

It had to be the gang of shiftless street punks who used to loiter outside the cafe on Truce Pier and peddle contraband. She couldn't forget their names if she tried—she grew up with most of them, being friends of Crono's, but that never meant she had to like them. In fact, she couldn't recall a single conversation with the lot that didn't revolve around crass invective (They liked to call her Booger. It wasn't a term of endearment.) "Great, I'm picking up the doofus station..." Lucca muttered. She reconsidered plugging that pipe.

("Okay, so when's Keffer coming by with the package? I wanna get this shit rollin', yo.")

With a long-suffering reflex she checked the antique clock nailed over the door, watching the dust weigh down its tarnished hands. It was a quarter 'til two.

("When he's done rollin' your mother.")  
("Ohhhhh, ice cold.")

It was going to be a long afternoon.


	2. Maiden's Honor

_9/16/1005:_

_Toastbot version 2.0 lives! He's even better than Toastbot 1.0. This time, he can walk upstairs to my room. A robot serving you breakfast in bed_—_how cool is that? True, it's one of the most mundane things I've ever invented (comparatively speaking!) but I'll still pretty pleased with it. And it hasn't blown up yet. Excuse me whilst I go knock on some wood._

_This latest incarnation of Toastbot still ejects toast at too high a velocity, by the way, and is a little hair-triggered. Need to recalibrate the spring-hatch to make it less sensitive, or integrate a shock-absorber_—_unless I want to take Crono's suggestion from the first model and turn Toastbot into Toastgun..._

_Had the weirdest dream last night. It was about Queen Leene! Only she was a dog. A dog in a big poofy dress. Wacky, right? I know Frog's gi'ira form is a dog, but that's a pretty bizarre logical leap, even for a dream. Nice transposition, subconscious._

-2-

The rug was the most fascinating thing in the world, at that moment. Little gold fleur de lune's were tightly stitched into plush royal blue, with the draconic insignia of the Guardia clan embroidered in the center. How long could it have taken the kingdom's best artisan to compose this masterpiece? Days? Weeks? That's how long he felt like he'd been kneeling on it, praying for a distraction from the pregnant silence that had blanketed the room.

At the rim of his vision was a ridge of white lace and purple velvet, at the skirt of a bed his eyes wouldn't dare trespass. There was a serpent constricted around his heart that wouldn't let him. His ears were drumming and his palms were sweating, and he had to focus not to wipe his nervousness off on the rug. He focused on the gold dragon at his feet, instead. That was a more reasonable adversary. At the slightest call he could take his sword and slay any beast, man or demon thrown at him, all out of pride for his country, yet here he was before the object of his undying fealty, unable to even look her in the eye. Quite a splendid doormat, him and the rug both.

He was playing the humble, subservient knight again—it was the most cowardly form of respect imaginable. Cyrus would've had a thing or two to say about him now, were it for anyone but Leene.

"Please, Glenn. Come sit." A silken glove patted the bedside. His gaze darted to catch it, and he regretted it instantly, swimming through a wave of dizziness.

_Focus._ He blinked and stood, feet dragging over the dragon like gravestones. Leene just asked him to sit with her. He couldn't help but comply, but at the same time he couldn't keep out of his mind that this was the second time he'd been invited to the queen's bedchamber. The first time didn't go too well. That last time, he was privy to his liege's darkest secret and hidden desire, and for all the objections in the world (the scandal, the dishonor, the legacy of his king and country) the kindest rejection his cursed gullet could produce was that he was not the right sort of man—or a man at all, really. _Inhuman_ was the word he used, and it stung worse from his own lips than it had from any other's.

_I would love to, more than you know, but..._ He didn't have that excuse anymore. When he walked out the door that night, he feared he'd never be invited back, but then again here he was. His queen, it seemed, was as merciful as she was beautiful.

The starchy mattress gave for him, and he fingered the edge of the bedcovers, seeking another diversion. The rug was out of reach. For all appearances, Leene was much more poised than he, at the moment. "I've so wanted to talk to you since you've returned, I almost could not bear it. You can only imagine..."

_I fear I've imagined more than I should,_ was the response he tactfully didn't voice. He found his next distraction: a lock of dusty green hair had fallen in front of his eyes, and he pooled his willpower into not brushing it aside—or making any sudden movement, for that matter.

Emerald eyes leaned closer to catch his own, and she graced him with a gentle, probing smile. "I've been dying to know where you've been. Tell me all about your travels. At supper you said it was a shamaness who lifted your curse, yes? What was she like? What brought you back to the castle?"

He swallowed, breathed, and surprised himself when his voice didn't creak (or croak. He had grown so accustomed to the croaking that it felt strange to speak without it.) "Ah, I only, it was, she-" He got stuck on the last question, his suddenly loose tongue tripping over an odd fantasy. Something about being close to Leene always made him frightfully candid. "...I've been having a strange dream."

"Oh? Tell me about it."

"I've been seeing this lady—er!" _Don't croak, for the love of God._ "In the dream, I mean."

She forgave the slip with a giggle, a spark of alacrity that was too much like a far-gone descendant—from queen to princess in an instant. "Have you dreamed of her often?"

He hesitantly nodded. "For quite some time. It's strange... I've never spoken of her to anyone, not even my friends." So why tell Leene? If only it weren't too late to take it back... yet somehow, he trusted the queen as his confidant more than any other soul. It was only funny that Leene must have thought the same of him, right up until that last visit. Perhaps he was simply—belatedly, after a year of estranged wandering—returning her favor.

"Why not?"

Glenn wasn't sure whether he appreciated her friendly ear for making him less nervous or more open, but the damage was already done. "I never knew how to mention it. The way she appears is just so strange..."

Her grin was neither too prying nor cutting, but definitely interested beyond common courtesy. "How so? What does she look like?"

He felt like a lousy bard as he recited a description he had written to heart. "She's always in blue, and she appears to me in a cloud. She wears the moon for a crown, the stars as a veil and the heavens for a cloak. I've never seen her anywhere before, but when I'm dreaming, I'm overcome with this feeling of familiarity, like I've known her my whole life. It's difficult to describe."

Leene's diagnosis was so thoughtful and serious that it could have sounded ludicrous from any other source. "She sounds like an angel. Does she speak to you?"

"Only this one thing: 'Come home.'" He combed a hand through his hair with a shrug, not failing to notice the way Leene's eyes followed him. "I can't begin to fathom what it could mean."

"Come home..." she murmured to the ceiling, mulling over each note like a child's lullaby. At length she looked back at him and declared with unmistakable gratitude, "And so, you returned to us."

_Anything to see you again, just to know I'm still welcome in your eyes._ Again, he held his tongue. He couldn't encourage the anticipation in her voice that made his skin crawl with sticky-sweet heat, even when her hand fell over his like the drop of a rose petal.

"I hope you know that words can't express my relief and happiness for your return." She brushed a delicate strand of blonde behind her ear, a warm shade of guilt welling beneath her eyes—they glowed more keenly than the oil of the lamp on the table. "I had never meant to drive you away."

"No, my Liege, you... It was me, I..." He stumbled over a plausible lie, another feckless act of kindness.

"No, it is all right," she paused him. "Do not make an excuse for my selfishness. It was not my place to ask so much of you."

This time he said it before he could think, his heart leaping straight out his throat. "Dear Leene, you could ask the world of me and I would not falter."

His sincerity was rewarded with a penitent smile. "I know. You've been too kind." She shifted closer, her dress rustling against his leg, and before he could draw another breath he felt the ivory silk of her fingers cupping his chin. "Glenn..." she uttered, so near and earnest that her slight touch kindled shivers.

Then she whispered, simply and terribly, "Do you still feel the way you did a year ago?"

_Yes._ No. Never and always. He was terrified and enraptured at once, all his fears and insecurities clamoring for attention over the heady urge to capture the woman he adored, but it was different this time. A still noble piece of him was thrashing to get away, yet he had no more self-abasing excuses.

_But she's the queen, another man's wife._ He remembered what started this—a tired and desperate confession in this very room, to the very same tune. Leene's words rattled him all the way from yesteryear. _'It's no way to sire a child.'_

At the time he was appalled, if sympathetic, and asked if there was any way he could help. Then she offered her proposal—her very self, and he... turned and ran. What else could he have done? Even now he wouldn't have to stretch his ear to hear the whispering of the maids in the halls, gossip fermenting on the tips of their ragged tongues. The spoken word can be devastating, he knew. He couldn't put the royal family—much less Leene—at risk that way, not ever.

He found the rug again. "...I couldn't chance besmirching your royal name, Your Majesty."

She forced his gaze again, tilting perilously close and breathing a plea that dissolved that last of his nerve. "Yet if you could forget I am your queen, for just this moment..."

Ensnared by her will and enthralled by her balmy scent, he could make out every facet of her beauty, from the dimples on her cheeks to the pearly gloss of her lips to the lily-blush of her bosom, framed squarely in lace and twine. He watched the lamplight draw deep, alluring shadows through the veil of her eyelashes, and the pounding in his head stopped with his heart. "I..." _am lost with you._

He wasn't going to finish that sentence, not in a million years. As her lips pressed into his, her tender strength burning him into submission, his last absurd thought was, _I'm only human._ How beautifully ironic—he would've had the mind to laugh, if he already hadn't lost it.

Velvet gave way to silk, to cinder-glow skin, to flushed lips and the subtle crackle of a kiss. They met once, and again, and then another time, each more fervently pressing towards the answer to question that shouldn't be asked. It was strange and soft and bitterly electric, like licking salt out of a wound, and Glenn hardly had enough time to savor it, much less think.

Her hot sigh tickled his ear. "Oh, Glenn..." Hearing his name in her luscious, needy voice nearly drove him over the edge, right there. "Ever since Cyrus left, you..."

He froze. His hands turned cold and brittle on her shoulders, and Leene leaned back to blink at him, alarmed and disheveled. "What? What's the matter?"

He couldn't believe it—himself, her... anything. Mortification struck so hard and fast that he almost couldn't speak. Slowly—painfully, with a croak that made his gut flinch, he peeled himself off the bed and got to his feet. "...I must go."

What was he thinking? Here was a woman unobtainable in his richest fantasies fawning all over him, and he was pushing her away. _Why?_ He followed the rug to the door, sick to his heart and more bereft of spirit than before. Just when he was almost gone, he made the mistake of looking back, and found Leene still sitting on the bed, perfect and shattered like a porcelain doll dropped on the floor.

She didn't say a thing, and after a beat Leene folded her hands in her lap and looked to the rug, as well. She must have known why. He wished he had the gall to ask, so he would know, himself.

Because no matter how great his achievements or how well he served his queen, he was the shadow of a greater man—no, worse. He didn't have to ask. He knew what Cyrus would say.

He was just a fool.


	3. Opening Up

_9/22/1005:_

_Went home early today. I started feeling sick again_—_just more of the usual, nothing critical. Mr. Varg clucked at me and said something about girls having "too much air in the head and blood in the sack to hold up to a man's job." Dirty old bastard. I flipped him the finger once I was outside (and he couldn't see me. Okay, so I'm the most cowardly rebel ever.)_

_Did some sketchy math lately, concerning the blight. I don't like to call my affliction that because it's based on a groundless accusation from a duly unreliable source, but at least it's a pretty wicked name. It makes me sound hardcore_—_not that there's anyone to talk to about it, besides the shadows. ...I shouldn't be writing about this. I also promised Alfador III I wouldn't talk to myself so much (that is, as the old Medinan philosopher Tai Bon would say, the first sign of insanity.) I feel bad for lying to him, but it's not very professional to feel remorse towards one's lab gerbil. I have a scientist's facade to maintain, after all._

_Anyway, about the blight (which it isn't, but allowing the benefit of the doubt...) It used to be localized around the snake bite, but now the marks burn all up my right leg and side, now. The veins are turning black, too, as if they're scorched, although when it doesn't hurt I still have full mobility. I've roughly measured the rate of growth at one-to-two centimeters per month, so if the infection continues to spread radially at this rate, in another three years it'll cover most of my body_—_although to be brutally honest, I doubt I'll make it that long. Every time I get the notion to go see a doctor, they_—_the shadows, that is_—_tell me it's pointless. I'm not sure whether to believe them. If it's all in my head, that would be like not listening to myself, and how crazy is that?_

_I still can't bring it to Marle, either. I don't want to burden her and Crono with this. If what the shadows and Mishu said is true, curative magic won't help, anyway. It's my problem, and I have to handle it on my own._

_Speaking of the shadows, I thought I caught one of their names while they were whispering to each other_—_or maybe they were just talking about a barn. I've read that knowing a spirit's name will enable you to control it, if you know the right spell. Maybe that's why they won't ever tell me theirs. ...I can't believe I'm actually acknowledging those little jerks now._

_Perhaps insanity is all in the perspective. I perceive I'm sane, but if I'm lying to myself, does that make me insane?_

_Good grief, this entry is morbid, but I can't help it. I won't shy away from the facts, and I won't let the prospect of dying or losing my mind scare me. If anything, it tells me that I need to work harder, before I run out of time._

_First though, I need a nap. My leg is killing me, and sitting in this stiff wooden chair doesn't help. Going to lie down for a while, hopefully until tomorrow (ugh, it's only Wednesday. Two more days of work before the weekend.)_

-3-

_'I'm starting to see why they call it a work box: because it's a load of work just moving it around.'_

Her mad, invisible companions continued to make odd quips while Lucca tried to clear a space for the cumbersome wooden chest she was just ordered to stow away. It wasn't often that Mr. Varg put a loan on a tool box, yet whenever he did, it was a doozy. It was big enough to make an ogan's coffin, with heavy oaken slats and iron latches. The customer had brought it in as far as the back counter, and once he left it was suddenly Lucca's problem (when she complained, "What am I supposed to do with this?" Varg's reply was, "You're supposed to be smart, aren'tchya? Figure it out.") Luckily it had been emptied of tools, else she would never be able to push it—although even that was becoming more of a herculean chore by the minute.

"Would it kill you... old man... to invest in a cart?" she huffed between each step, the box grating against the floor hard enough to leave dusty streaks. "Or a... dolly, or... any sort of... simple machine? Mankind's greatest invention... is still considered... the wheel! It's like working for a... damn caveman."

She took that thought back; it was insulting to cavemen, and she knew some very nice ones. Varg was just a stingy old crab.

Overhearing her frustration, Varg shouted through the curtain, shouted through the curtain, "Bitch, bitch, Ashtear. If you spent less time flappin' your gums and more time moving, you might get some damn work done."

Lucca grumbled some sour retort and then braced against the other side of the box, angling to push it around another shelf. Her palms bit into a wreath of rust and cobwebs, and she had to whine again, "Geez, if a spider jumps out of this thing I'm going to die..."

_'There aren't any spiders in there.'  
'Damnit, I wasn't about to tell her that! Quit spoiling my fun.'_

She secretly thanked the other brother for being a spoilsport and resumed her effort. After barely making any more headway, Lucca decided to turn on the other half of her brain and apply some grease to the box's feet, forging a slick railway all the way to the back corner. "Hah! Work smarter, not har-" The box reached a puddle of spilled oil and spurted ahead, letting her fall face-first to the floor. "-ooaf!"

_'Gwahaha! You're pretty klutzy for a so-called genius, you know that?'_

"Oi! You break anything?" Varg barked at the racket.

Lucca peeled herself off the ground, examined the grime around her freshly-scraped elbows and peevishly answered, "Ugh, no... Just my dignity."

Varg responded with gravelly nonchalance, "Well I didn't pay for that. Quit goofin' around back there, you clumsy dyke."

"I hate this damn job..." Lucca muttered, meeting her quota of disgust for the day as she finished relocating the tool box and cleaning up the oil slick.

("What the hell? You think we call it a dime bag because that's how much it costs? You ain't gettin' shit for those peanuts.")  
("Com'on man, you know I'm good for it...")

Speaking of collateral loans, she could still overhear the gang in the alley next door, up to their usual gimmicks. They had a customer of their own, a regular by the sounds of him, and Haru was dealing him a hard bargain today.

("Oh don't even start, man. We're doin' some new management up in this joint. No more tabs. This ain't a bar.")

Charlie piped up, his tone slick with interest, ("Y'got a nice watch there, though.")

("Huh? Oh, yeah, my dad gave it to me... Oh no way, guys, I can't give you my watch.")

Haru played into it. ("You said you're good for it, right? You want some good stuff, you'll let us hold on to it. You can get it back when you pay for it. Sound fair?")

("...Alright, dude...")

Thus settled, the customer went on his way, and Lucca heard Charlie settling onto the lid of a trash can. ("The hell's this watch made of, anyway?")

("I dunno, but it looks nice. Think it's silver or what?") Haru guessed.

It lightly jingled as Charlie shook it on his wrist. ("No man, it's this weird-lookin' metal...")

Liquel's chirpy accent pitched in, ("Maybe it's like, aluminium. I hear they makin' all kinds of stuff outta that now.")

("What the hell did you just say...?") Gary broke in, curiously aghast.

She imagined Liquel's confused shrug. ("What? Aluminium.")

("Are you talkin' about fuckin' aluminum?")

("Aluminum is what they're making tools and ladders and stuff out of now, right?") Haru tried to interject before Gary's voice rose to a fever pitch.

It was a wasted effort. ("I know, but he's sayin' it all fucked-up!")

Liquel fired back, ("You guys are the ones saying it fucked up! It's al-u-min-i-um.")

Charlie threw in a mollifying, ("Just forget it, man. He went to school in Choras, remember?")

Gary blew up on a tangent, regardless. ("Cripes, Liquel, I know you learned your ABC's off the side of a cow, but here in Truce we teach the fuckin' language proper n' shit, not no throwin' all extra letters and sounds in there for the fuck of it.")

Liquel's tone turned indignant. ("Hey hey, I ain't just gonna sit here and listen t'you dissin' my home town.")

("What'do you want, a fuckin' apology?") Gary spat back. ("I'm sorry your mamma lives in a toilet town that don't know how to read. How's that?")

("You son of a-")

Haru's ("Whoa!") was too late to break up the brawl that ensued. Tin cans and milk crates were battered against the walls as the two scuffled over the sparse pavement. There was a nearly a minute of discordant thrashing, punctuated by the hard smack of flesh and shoes against brick.

"Oh my gawd, I can't take it anymore..." Lucca slammed her hands on the workbench, got up and strode over to the corner transmitting all the clamour.

_'You're finally gonna cram this job up that old man's ass?'_ the black voice asked with a thread of hope.

"No! I mean these ignorant clowns..."

Lucca crouched before the cubbyhole, drew a testy breath and then paused. She hadn't considered it before—talking back through the wall. She never had anything to say to those goons, and she didn't want to give them a reason to think somebody was eavesdropping on their 'business.' Surely sound could conduct through the stovepipe both ways, but just because it was feasible didn't make it a good idea.

("Agh-ah!")  
("Geez Gary let him go!")  
("Say it! Say 'aluminum,' bitch!")  
("Ahhh... alufuckyoum...!")

...Oh, to hell with it. "Aluminium is an acceptable alternate spelling, and is actually more commonplace in literature from the last century."

The fight ground to a swift halt. Lucca could have dropped a pin in the lull and gotten a louder report than the response she was getting from that alley, and she bit her lip, suddenly nervous.

Then came the most awestruck curse she'd ever heard. ("Holy _shit_, what was that?")

Her compulsion to correct people was going to get the better of her one of these days, but she couldn't resist the urge to follow-up, "As a matter of fact, the Library of Choras is becoming one of the most reputable authorities on language in the world, so before long we might all be taught to say al-u-min-i-um in school."

Gary sounded suitably dumbfounded. ("What. The hell.")

She heard Liquel jump up and cheer, ("You see? Holy shit thank you, weird talking voice lady.")

Haru began to sniff around the skirt of the alley, his suspicion piqued. ("Where is that coming from?")

("I dunno, it sounds like it's coming from everywhere.") Liquel didn't have a clue.

("I'm freakin' out, man...") Charlie said timorously.

Gary stood up to the wall and shouted boldly, ("Hey lady! Who the hell are you?")

Lucca stifled a wily grin, flushed with relief and perverse delight. It was fortunate that her voice was distorted and amplified through the pipe beyond recognition. She decided on a whim to be mysterious—she was having too much fun. "I am she, the one who speaks through walls."

-3-

_'I think it's time.'  
'Today?'_

Lucca was much more resolute about not acknowledging the voices in public than she was in private, for obvious reasons. When the brothers were together, their cryptic discourse seemed to be as pointless as it was ceaseless, anyway.

_'Indeed.'  
'Heh! This is gonna be good.'_

She tucked her tool pouch under her arm, pressed her helmet snugly over her head and ducked through the stream of evening commuters. The main avenues of Truce were busiest before sundown, and if a pedestrian made a wrong turn, the law favored the speeding carriage. She didn't enjoy fighting traffic, much less crowds, and that was another reason she rarely left work on time. She could have stomached the alleyway banter for another hour or two (even if it made her feel like an illicit accessory) and waited until the workers and wives were home and the sailors and drunks were at the taverns, but a headache had snuck up on her (probably from all the unnecessary heavy moving), and she was feeling a little sick and tired. The sooner she got home, the better.

At least the walk was refreshingly scenic. The cobblestone streets and cast iron lampposts were dusted with rosy gold in the autumn sunset, and the clouds played through a kaleidoscope of pinks and blues.

_'Watch your step.'_

Right, not getting run over in broad daylight would be nice, too. She was watching the sidewalk a little too closely when she bumped into a tall man walking the other way. "Whoa! Hey there-" he started, barely breaking stride to lift his arm and let her pass. Lucca glimpsed a faded brown trench coat and an affable smirk beneath the brim of a fedora (he had a clean, smart, young face, one she didn't recognize—not that she studied a lot of faces. She was trying to watch her damn step) before belting out an apology and dashing away.

_'I think that was a policeman.'  
'Seriously?'  
'Did you see the badge under his coat?'__  
'Hah! Nice going, klutz.'_

"Shut up," Lucca hissed, scrambling around the corner and onto a dirt path that would take her out of town and to her home island. No, she didn't see any badge—how could she if it was under his coat? The voices always noticed little things like that, all the same. Why should a police officer make her nervous, anyway? She wasn't a criminal or anything, even if the way she squeaked and rushed off just then was a mite suspicious. Maybe tuning in to Gary's gang was already making her conscience itch—she had heard way too much about the things one could buy around the wrong corner.

_'Oh, don't run away, now. We've got a surprise for you.'  
'Heheheh.'_

She didn't wait to hear any more about it. Sure, trying to outrun the voices was crazy and fruitless (not to mention exacerbated her headache), but if the clattering wooden planks of the bridge could drown them out for just a minute, it was worth it. For better or for worse, by the time she reached the island, cleared the unkempt yard, skipped over the transformer box she meant to move out of the grass three months ago, and kicked in the jammed latch to the front door of her house, all she could hear was the pounding between her ears.

Lucca dropped her tools, tossed her helmet into a chair and fell straight onto the couch, never minding the grease on her gloves and overalls. No piece of furniture in her house had seen its original colors since she was a little kid. The couch used to be red, maybe, but she couldn't be sure anymore. Maybe if she rubbed in enough dirt, the stains would at least look uniform.

She lay across the cushions like a beached fish for nearly an hour, staring listlessly at the dust balls on the coffee table and trying to lose her aching mind. There was a dated newspaper on the ground that she had folded and wedged under the table's wobbly leg. The headline was chewed off by a mouse she never caught, and the paper was starting to turn yellow. Besides that, she knew it was old because the last person who brought newspapers into her house was her father. She could remember that much with stinging clarity—she just couldn't remember when she quit trying to legitimately fix things around the house. Eventually daylight slipped away and it grew so dark Lucca couldn't find the glasses on her nose, so she gave in, sat up and turned on a lamp.

And then shrieked and jumped over the back of the sofa.

'Why, hello.'  
'Surprise! Hah.'

Lucca clung to the ragged upholstery for support, gaping at the visitors that had manifested out of thin air, right on her coffee table. Or... over it. Around it? They couldn't be sitting on her table if they didn't have any hindquarters with which to sit—they didn't have any solid substance at all, actually. They appeared as little more than plumes of grey smoke, hardly bigger than housecats, tangled in heavy coils around the edges of the table and staring up at her with two pairs of neon blue and red eyes, respectively.

What were these—monsters? Demons? _Ghosts_? She hated to admit that she now believed in ghosts, yet she was presented with irrefutable evidence on more than one occasion. That didn't mean she was about to jump and cry 'ghost' at every little shadow, but it was enough to give her pause. "What the-?" Her mind scrambled for the best response, although it was torn between setting the apparitions on fire and putting them out (running screaming from the house was a distant third option.) Her own recollection caught her, however.

Two years before, when she went hunting for her parents' killers, they nearly did her in, as well. That was when she first met them face-to-face—not the killers, per se, but these cloudy creatures with the reptilian masks and glowing eyes—although it all seemed like an elaborate near-death dream. When she awoke, the black voices kept speaking to her as if nothing had happened. She knew it was them, though, because they looked and sounded just the same as they did back then, every wispy detail burned into her photographic memory.

"You! I..." she stammered, the next step beyond her. What good did recognition do her?

The blue-eyed one spoke first, his oily tone eerily placating. 'Relax. Only you can see us.'

"Oh," she flatly said. The shadows seemed to wait for her to digest that. The red-eyed one cocked his brow impatiently, and she shook herself out of her dumb shock by turning around and marching up the stairs towards her room. "Okay, so now I'm visually hallucinating, too. That's great."

It was a worthless retreat; as soon as she turned on the light the twins were there, seeping out of the floorboards to meet her. The blue one corkscrewed up a bedpost to reach her at something closer to eye-level. 'Now, now. We've decided that since we're getting so well acquainted, we might as well quit lurking about and let you see our true forms.'

When Lucca last saw them, they had a brief and hardly revelatory conversation, although she did recall their every word regardless of whether or not they made sense. "You're rapiers. I already knew that."

'True,' the blue one granted with a congenial nod.

And she wouldn't dare forget a rapier if she saw one again—or two, in this instance. Her friends were once attacked by one named... "But you don't like to possess people, unlike Seth..."

'Very true.'  
The red one shook his hazy muzzle and gagged. 'Ugh, humans, gross.'

"And you're after..." She hesitated to skim her memory for their motive. Over the years they had mentioned very little and yet a great deal about some ethereal magic demigods, ones she only knew from fairytales and a very old, arcane book. "...revenge, on the espers. Have I recapped everything so far?"

The red one perked up affirmatively. 'You're on the money.'

Lucca wasn't sure how deliberating with her hallucinations was going to help her, but she sure as hell wasn't about to entertain them with polite conversation. She had to approach this discursively, or not at all. "And you think I can somehow help you with this?"

The blue one's answer only confounded her. 'You're already helping us.'

"How?"

'It's no fun to tell you everything now, is it?' the red one chided.  
The blue one's tone was much more conciliatory, if not much more helpful. 'Try to remember. We've met before.'

She scratched her temple, nonplussed. Her headache was coming back. "When? You mean back when we were fighting Ramezia?"

The red one shook his head again. 'Neh. Keep going.'

"Going where? When did we meet?" She thought back to when she first refused to concede insanity, to a snake in the grass and a dark whisper in the back of her every waking thought, like a demonic echo. They had just slain Lavos. She wasn't going to make that connection, because it was too insidious. She couldn't blame Lavos for every ill in her life—the only lasting impression that monster left was some post-traumatic stress. "If I started hearing you in my head right after the Millennial Fair, then we met... sometime during our quest to kill Lavos, wasn't it?"

'If you want to get technical about it, we met you thousands of years ago.'

She snapped her fingers. "In the past! So I did meet you while time-traveling."

To her vexation, the brothers merely sniggered.  
'Eheheheheh.'  
'Heheheh.'

"What's so funny?"

'You don't get it,' was all the red one would say.

She could have kicked one of these translucent monsters, but figured she would end up punting a book or chair across the room instead. She settled for grabbing a pillow and hurling it at the nearest foe. "No, I don't! That's why I'm asking, argh!"

The blue one hurdled over the flying object like a buoy over a slight wave. 'Come now, let's not be hostile. We'd like to give our relationship a fresh start.'

Lucca collapsed on the bed and buried the sight of her unwanted guests behind a sheet of quilted linen, like a child hiding under the covers from a ghost. "How about by leaving me alone?"

The blue one feigned injury, holding his tapering tail over the void of his heart. 'Tsk, so harsh. And we're just trying to be friends.'

The red one squatted at the foot of the bed and sneered, 'Yeah, how rude. How 'bout some damn courtesy?'

"I don't want to be your friend!" she railed at them, kicking the blanket away as if it were tainted. "I didn't ask to have anything to do with your revenge, whatever it is you're doing. I don't care about rapiers or espers or any of that!"

'We're not asking you to do anything, like we said. We're only trying to be open with you.'

"Except you won't tell me _how_ I'm not doing anything to help you," she snipped, glowering at the blue one as it inched by her side.

'It's not relevant, is it?' he quibbled.

"It's relevant to everything! It's why you're here, bothering me!"

'Don't worry about it.'

'Yeah, we've taken care of it,' the red one backed him up. 'And what my brother is saying is that we're willing to do the same for you.'

Lucca screwed up a look of distrust. "What's that supposed to mean?"

'We mean that our friendship might be more valuable than you think. We have special skills, things you won't find anywhere else...' The blue one ghosted over her ankle, and this time she went for the kick—her foot passed clean through him. She won a sly grin for the effort. '...knowledge that can help you.'

"What makes you think I need help?"

'The blight.'

Lucca held her breath, and the blue one pounced on that flicker of anxiety.

'It still hurts, doesn't it? That nice, stinging, burning sensation, keeping you up at night...? We know how to manage it. We can make it easier for you.'

She frowned, determined not to take such soliciting from a couple of loose spirits. "I can handle it fine. It's not actually the blight, okay? It's just an old snake bite."

He lowered a true blue stare at her in return. 'You're a terrible liar. Ignoring it isn't the same as handling it. Stop deluding yourself.'

The red one crept up to her other side. 'You remember what that neiphiti whore told you. She said the darkness will consume you.'

'And she's right. The only chance you have to escape that fate is to trust us.'

Lucca rolled off the bed and to her feet, furiously pacing away from the madness. "The only delusion here is you! I don't have to buy any of this! You're not real."

'You'll admit that you're insane, then?'

She stopped and crossed her arms, fuming—more upset with herself than anything. Why was she letting this happen? Why was she being weak? Even as they mentioned it, those wretched scars seethed and ached, pulling her argument right from under her feet. She wanted to kick something again, anything—it was enough to make her feel ill. She just wanted to lie down and pretend this wasn't happening.

The blue one slithered close again, entreating suavely, 'Lucca, Lucca, please. Let's start over.' He then bowed, a tendril of his dusky mane brushing her hand. It was cold; she shivered. 'My name is Bairith.'

'Barnath,' the other one gruffly offered, nowhere near as eloquently as his brother.

Were they kidding? What kinds of names were those? She regarded them both with a glum snort. "Barnath and Bairith."

The spirits nodded earnestly. They were, sadly, serious.

It felt like signing her soul over to the devil. She could either take the word of a couple of ghosts and throw away the last of her sanity, or admit there was nothing left to throw away, after all. They were right about one thing: she couldn't handle what was happening to her alone. It was too easy to forget oneself, day after day of the same tiresome routine. She could tell herself she didn't need any companionship. She knew how to take solace in solitude, and was strong enough to support herself in every worldly way, but...

She wouldn't admit that the darkness scared her. It was the great, dreaded unknown—the one thing that knew how tinge her dreams with shades of doubt and rattle her nightmares to the core.

Lucca sealed the deal with a mirthless laugh, too sick and tired to resist, for once in her life. "Heh! Fine. Crazy must love company."


	4. The Grey Wolf

_10/2/1005:_

_On the way to work today I passed a crazy bum on the street corner holding a sign that reads, "The End is Neer." Took everything I had not to laugh in his face._

_Oh, if he only knew._

-4-

'What in the world are you up to with that?'  
'I'm going to wake her up.'  
'You don't want something bigger?'  
'Oh no, this is perfect.'  
'Just don't bite her with it; that one looks venomous.'  
'Do I look stupid to you?'  
'I hope that's a rhetorical question.'  
'Oh, go to hell.'

That was the only warning Lucca got, in the cloudy ceiling of her subconscious as she dozed in bed, presumably safe and sound. She was on the threshold between dreaming and deep slumber when she felt something playing a delicate tattoo on her arm, just a hair more than a normal itch. When she mustered the energy to scratch it, the sensation only switched arms, skittering all the way up to her shoulder. That was when she finally dragged herself into the fuzzy grey morning, turned over on her pillow and settled her blurry gaze on... some little blob thing... with a lot of legs...

Her vision sharpened and she scrambled out of bed in an instant, churning up the covers with a horrified shriek and sending the spider tumbling to the floor. Her frantic scream reverberated throughout the house against the backdrop of maniacal laughter.

'Gwahahahahahahah! Morning, sunshine!'  
'You're terrible, you know that?' his brother upbraided him in a tone that didn't conceal his morbid amusement.

Lucca slumped against the wall, flustered and drained from a close encounter with arachnophobia first thing in the morning. It took her a minute to pick up her ragged bearings and put the picture together. "You... Damnit! That wasn't funny!"

'Ahahaha, what? It's just an itty, bitty spider! Didn't make you piss your pants, did it?'

She grumbled bitterly, swept the room for traces of the eight-legged fiend that managed to escape, eventually gave up and plodded off to change her shorts.

Her "friendship" with Barnath and Bairith was off to a great start.

-4-

_'Come home.'_

Glenn was fairly positive that whatever the lady in his dreams meant by 'home,' it wasn't this old hovel.

He pushed past the overgrown sticker bushes shrouding the entrance and waded into the dark, feeling his way along worn, familiar footholds that suddenly seemed a lot shorter than he remembered. He couldn't quite recall when or how he thought it was a good idea to live in a hole in the ground, except that it was more of an amphibious notion than a human one. Back then, the dank aroma of fermenting plants and mould was oddly soothing, and the packed dirt walls made a comfortable ambience. It had been over a year since he set foot in his earthen hermitage, nestled just deep enough in the Cursed Woods to discourage visitors, and yet he could still count all the fungal polyps on the ceiling if he closed his eyes and dreamed in the shallows.

It took a while to find and light the candle on the table, its wick shriveled and stale and his striking stone buried at the bottom of a basket, and once he did he sat on the bed and took a long moment to drink in the dusty, lukewarm shadows.

He always came here to hide from the world; it was just the reasons that seemed to change. The castle was far behind him. He had realized once and for all that he didn't belong there. Although he would forever be a Knight of Guardia in heart and deed, it was a duty he had perfected in his wide and colorful travels, not marching under the king's banner. Wherever his true home might be, every step across the vast frontier drew closer to it than the throne ever had. He hadn't before realized how liberating for him it was to simply travel. The only thorn in his heart was left by his queen, and it came with the sad discovery that he could only truly protect her honor from afar.

So it happened that after all the misadventures and otherworldly heroism, he had once again come full circle, sitting alone with his thoughts in a burrow more fit for a beast than a man. "What now...?" he breathed, letting the question hang in roots dangling overhead like a warped chandelier. In the past, shame and regret were his favorite bedfellows, and every stage of his life was plagued with doubt and uncertainty, yet there was a measure of respite to be found in these woods that he couldn't find anywhere else. Glenn could never describe it properly, but it cleared his head and made him feel... peaceful, if not content.

He wasn't sure what he did to deserve it, but he wanted to take advantage of his fair mood while it lasted. He decided to patrol the surrounding forest and survey all the changes in his absence. He had once mapped every pit, pond, stump and toadstool to his memory, and he could fill out the rest of the week doing it all over again. He took his most stalwart companion, his sword, and went for a walk.

The Cursed Woods weren't named for no good reason. The old, moss-bearded trees plotted an arboreal labyrinth that could bewilder a sphinx and send a man lost to his grave. Much of the land was more swamp than wood, sinkholes deep enough to swallow one whole posed as mere puddles, and poisonous insects and flora abound-even the toads spit acid at intruders. At any given spot the list of things within ten paces that were hazardous or downright lethal was daunting. It was an inhospitable hell devised by nature, and Glenn thrived in it. His future-gone friends used to criticize his choice of homestead ('Could you possibly live somewhere where everything I step on isn't gross and trying to kill me?') but he couldn't make them understand, and didn't try.

He encountered a fallen, rotten oak filled with stinging grubs, a giant orb-weaver whose web blocked an old trail, and a t'pole that tried to jump on his back, but otherwise nothing his blade couldn't remedy. The afternoon was dry and dull when he met a creek that was running wider and clearer than usual-there had to be a fresh spring nearby, and if he uncovered it he wouldn't have to worry about clean water. He followed it upstream for nearly an hour before he found something he wasn't expecting at all.

Glenn heard it before he saw it: a throaty, bestial growl. He stepped onto a small, leaf-strewn clearing and found it: a solitary grey wolf, marked with the muted tabby-streaks of summer. It squared against him, shoulders hunched in a feral stance and teeth bared with a snarl. Glenn froze, surprised at first, and then slowly edged his sword into a sound grip. "Hey there..." he said softly, treading cautiously around the beast and waiting for it to make the first move. He wasn't partial to wolf meat, and he'd rather chase it away than hurt it, but if it attacked, it was fair game as far as he was concerned.

The wolf followed him with fierce amber eyes, tail held low and ears cocked at half-mast. It wasn't priming for an attack, yet it didn't yield any ground, rooted to the spot. Then Glenn noticed the red blotches and matted fur along its hindquarters, and discovered why it could neither run nor pounce: it was trapped. A toothy metal contraption was cinched over its hind leg, cutting down to the bone.

"Oh... so that's how it is..." he mused out loud, crouching at a safe distance to get a better look at the predicament. He wasn't about to leave this noble creature to its fate, yet he wasn't sure how to approach it without getting his face bitten off.

He ultimately decided to go for it, trusting his reflexes to save him if the situation turned ugly. He inched closer, keeping low and holding his weapon back. As he neared, the wolf's initially aggressive snarl simmered down, yet the moment he was within arm's reach the wolf twisted around and snapped at him. Glenn fell back on his elbow, dodging it by a breath, although the wolf lunged too far, wrenching its leg in the trap and recoiling with a yelp.

"Whoa boy! Easy..." He glimpsed the writhing animal's profile and corrected himself. "...er, girl. Easy, girl." He held still until the she-wolf reconsidered her demeanor and dropped the menacing curl to her lip, before Glenn tried to move in again. This time she allowed him close enough to examine the rusty hinges of the trap, although the wolf's whine wound back up to a warning growl at the hand taking hold of her injured ankle.

"I know, hang on, easy..." Glenn continued to coax her, not really sure if his voice was helping but willing to try anything to keep the animal calm. He was only amazed that it seemed to work; the wolf fixed him with one steady eye that seemed to convey a grudging, wary brand of trust. Granted that much, Glenn worked as fast as possible, finally working out the switch to loosen the trap.

As soon as it popped open the wolf took a cue to leap away, although Glenn held her fast by the leg. "Hang on! Hang on, just one more second..." The wolf struggled for an instant before submitting with another low-key whine. Her patience would hardly last another minute, he knew, but Glenn couldn't let her go that easily. Her leg was shredded, chewed and raw from teeth that doubtlessly considered chewing the doomed limb off. He knew that such a wound would be a death sentence to a wild creature in this forbidding place, but luckily, he had a magical solution.

He closed his eyes and focused on the minute threads of water around him, drawing on their life-giving succour. "Cure..." he uttered with the solemn dedication of a prayer, and once he opened his eyes the restorative magic had done most of its work, wrapping the wolf's leg in ephemeral bandages of sparkling white silk. The spell dissipated in seconds, leaving cleanly knitted flesh and fur in place of the bloody gashes of a minute ago.

"Huh." Glenn smiled, never failing to be astonished by the power and grace of magic, even from the hands of a mere man such as he. He released the wolf at last and she bounded away, putting some feet between herself and her savior. She then checked herself, tentatively sniffed the healed leg, and looked back at Glenn for one long, inscrutable pause before darting away through the brush.

"Hmm, you're welcome," he said wryly, getting back to his feet in good humor. Still, the whole incident troubled him. How did that trap get here, deep in these woods that civilization deemed too dangerous to trespass? Who would put such a thing here, and to what end? Glenn picked up the disabled trap by its chain, regarding the tree root it was anchored to with a vexed frown.

Somebody was meddling with _his_ forest.


	5. The First Lesson

_10/8/1005:_

_Crono came to visit! He stopped by first thing in the morning and stayed until lunch. It was a nice surprise; I hadn't seen him in a few weeks. It still tickles me that he actually comes in through that pet flap I installed in the attic. There's one thing the beast talent makes easy for us: whenever we want to visit each other, we just turn into birds and fly over. It's a hell of a lot quicker than walking, that's for sure._

_We played cards downstairs and then went to town for some ice cream, since I don't have anything good to eat around the house. Pretty soon winter will be here and the ice cream stand is going to close up, anyway. I wondered why he didn't bring Marle along (she loves strawberry flavor, her favorite), and he said she was out training with the soldiers that morning. That's pretty odd, isn't it? I didn't take her for one so disciplined, but apparently she works out a lot with the king's men._

_...Oh boy, that didn't sound right. I didn't mean it like that at all!_

-5-

"A _wheelchair_?"

She couldn't help staring—gawking, even. If she ever wanted to prove that Mr. Varg was the epitome of evil, she believed she was looking at the seminal piece of evidence.

The wheelchair itself wasn't ugly, really, with polished brass wheels and fittings and a well-worn leather seat. From where Lucca stood behind the little ebony gate between the clerk's counter and the showroom floor, it was easy to see why it might make a good commodity for the shop; it was only difficult to grasp the scruples of the purchase. Beyond her, a young man was helping his father hobble out the front door, their purse a little less empty for leaving behind their best means of locomotion.

"You took in a wheelchair," Lucca said again, testing him, for once too incredulous to believe what was right in front of her. No businessman could be _this_ iniquitous. "You just took a wheelchair from an elderly man who can't walk."

Beside her, Varg turned around in his 'throne,' an odd hybrid barstool with tall legs and a short, wicker-woven back, supposedly salvaged from a beach resort. He propped his bad leg on the shelf beneath the counter and cocked his good eye in her direction. "Master a' the damn obvious, aren't ya, Ashtear?"

"Yes," she made a pithy shot at sarcasm. Immediately regretting how lame she just sounded, she asked instead, "How much did you give him for it?"

Varg usually didn't answer that question ("That business ain't none a' yours. Mind your own damn pennies,") but today he was straightforward (well, as straightforward as a crooked old geezer could get.) "Two fifty."

She shouldn't have asked. "Two fifty? That's it? That's robbery!"

"No, that's business. If they're sellin', I'm buyin'. What's it to you?"

She knew the correct response was 'nothing,' or storming from the room in protest for the hundredth time, yet a carefully repressed and temporally conflicted part of Lucca was squeamish around wheelchairs. They were a cold, tangible reminder of the sometimes grisly necessity of invention. She and her father had developed and donated several to disabled people throughout the community, making a good deed of their talents, although the first one they created—as far as she shouldn't remember—was for her mother. It made her heart cringe with grief and shame every time she looked back on it, because _that_ wheelchair was the final result of a long and twisted string of failures—at last being unable to fabricate a pair of functional replacement legs despite her years of study and effort (so many smashed prototypes that could never hold the proper weight and balance)—and at first failing to prevent the very accident that stole her mother's vitality.

No matter how comforting the resolution of the current timeline, in which her mother was never crippled and those wheelchairs were made out of sheer goodwill rather than self-inflicted penance, the memory that first, special one (rolling it up to her mother's bedside like a grim consolation prize, her father standing in the doorway and urging her on with a lost, clumsy smile—and then apologizing through tears that she was too brave to show) would haunt Lucca forever. (And yet her mother never did use it. She said it was a nice thought, stowed it in the closet and stayed home. Nice thoughts don't fix anything.)

Now Lucca was stuck wondering if this was one of the models her father helped produce, although it was difficult to discern anymore—all the good and bad artifacts of her memory overlapped like soggy old sheets of paper, glued together by a sticky red gate. She couldn't burn the book if she tried.

The least she could do was find out whether or not she was actually working for the Devil. "I have to know: how exactly did it feel when you sold your soul?"

Varg turned away, lit his smoke pipe, and for once delivered a retort without any spite or vinegar. "Business is business. Can't have a heart in this line'a work. If I was runnin' a charity 'ere I'd be out on my ass without a ride faster than Mr. Dimsel, there." He nodded out the door at the bygone customers, and then at the chair with a strange, sullen edge that took the bite out of Lucca's reproach. "Now go on and take 'er back."

She didn't really understand, but Lucca did as she was told, and never asked that question again.

-5-

Gary's gang had accepted the presence of 'the wall lady' without much thought (which happened to be the way they decided nearly everything.) Since they couldn't track down the source of the mysterious voice (much less wrestle it into submission), and they didn't want to abandon their well-established loitering pad, their best recourse was to allow this innocuous omniscience as if she were there all along (which she had been—they just didn't know it.) At first they were fidgety about being overheard, but eventually they grew comfortable talking about all of their favorite topics (no matter how crass or incriminating.) They sometimes even asked for the lady's input, and she would be too humored not to oblige. In a funny way, it was as if she had become 'one of the guys,' anonymously.

This didn't mean their curiosity had been slaked, and every once in a while Haru or another of the more inquisitive types would wheedle in a probing question that the lady always gently and firmly rebuffed. She never had to tell them anything, and as far as Lucca was concerned, that was the best part.

She was sitting on the floor in the back corner of Varg's shop, batting dust away from her lunch and passively listening through the pipe when the gang's usual 'supplier' showed up. Gary, ever the leader, greeted him first without stepping off the wall and upsetting his perfect image of nonchalance. "'sup Keffer. How's the old lady?"

Keffer tossed a paper bag into the back of the alley, where Charlie was perched on his trash can, ready to catch it. The new arrival then eased into his own corner, somehow managing to slouch and look cool without sitting down or leaning on any of the garbage. Keffer had a tall, relaxed voice to match his stature, although he couldn't help sounding browbeaten as he admitted, "Aw, Laci's been all up in this 'feminist' bullshit."

Liquel passed him a squished look. "Fem my what?"

Keffer shrugged. "Exactly. It's like, ever since she and her girlfriends read this dumb book some tighty from Porre wrote, she thinks she don't have to do shit around the house no more."

Charlie picked a pastry out of his trouser pocket and asked around a mouthful of dough, "Li'e, whadd'you mean? She stop doin' chores?"

"Yeah, she gets all in my face sayin' _why don't I take out the trash_, because she's an 'independent woman' and don't have to take orders from a man all day long."

"Sounds like she needs to take a lil' somethin' from a man..." Gary muttered.

Keffer shook his fist, exasperated. "I'll give her my lil' somethin' if she keeps this shit up. A man got it hard enough without his girl gettin' all these weird ideas."

Haru warily pried, "And what's this called, again?"

"Feminism." Keffer wagged a finger at the gang. "Just you watch, it'll happen to your girl, too."

Gary threw a snicker at his cohorts squatting over a pile of empty boxes and rat nests. "Heh, those losers would have to get real girlfriends, first."

"Aw shuddup..." Haru grumbled. He then sat up on his milk crate and pitched a rogue question skyward. "Hey lady, what's your position on feminism?"

Liquel didn't miss a beat. "I know my position: on top of your mom."

Charlie laughed until he was interrupted with a rough jab from his little brother. The sound of fitful coughing filled the alley—"Holy hell Charlie, maybe if you weren't stuffing your face all day you wouldn't choke up whenever somebody slugs you!"—while the lady ruminated over Haru's enquiry.

Eventually that voice returned from nowhere, after a long walk around the subject, ("Did Laci ever complain about being overburdened with chores?")

Keffer shrank a step and threw a vexed look around the vacant eaves. "Huh? Aw hell, how should I know?"

("Did you ever ask? Perhaps she was feeling under appreciated for all her work, and decided that the only way to communicate that was to stage a working strike to get your attention—on a micro-cosmetic scale, of course.")

"What's Laci's makeup got to do with this...?" Charlie quietly wondered.

Haru shot him a screwy look. "What? She didn't say _cosmetics_, you deaftard. She said... uh, whatever it is she just said."

Keffer waved through the nonsense. "Look lady, don't get all smart on me, just tell me how I can get my wife to start taking out the damn trash again."

As if taking issue with being rushed, the lady's speech only got more sententious as it meandered towards a point. ("Well, a central theme of the feminist ideology is the equal treatment of women and men in several aspects of life, including day-to-day labor. Since Laci seems willing to adopt a man's labor practices—or the lack thereof, in this case—to convey her message, it seems only fair that you be willing to accommodate her on the same level, as an employer would an unsatisfied employee.")

Keffer considered that with a wry snort. "If I ever stopped doin' my work, my boss would go find me and whoop my ass. So..." An idea struck, and he clapped his fist with a vindictive grin. "You're saying I need to go home and show 'er who's boss."

Haru's disparaging scowl spoke for the alley. "No you dipshit, she's sayin' Laci is _unsatisfied_. Means you ain't been holdin' up in the sack."

Charlie laughed harder at that, until Keffer fired back, "Hey, I can hold up in the sack better than anybody—just ask your mom."

"Ohhhhhhh!" Liquel rolled off his crate in applause. "Ahahaha, good burn."

("Actually...") the lady's voice came back, terse and heavy with a rebuke, but then her tone lightened graciously. ("What I mean to say is that if you sit down and try to negotiate with her, you might get surprising results.")

Keffer balked at the notion. "I ain't negotiatin' with my own damn wife!"

("You don't have to, but if you don't find out what she wants, then you'll never figure out why she really quit working around the house. I'll bet it has less to do with that so-called feminism than you think.")

"Damn, man," Haru conceded at the sight of Keffer's manly pout. "I think she's right."

"What, that Laci's dog ain't got enough bone?" Liquel guessed.

"No, geez," Haru lectured the lot of them. "I mean you gotta talk to a bitch, make a deal. It's that 'compromise' shit chicks always nag about. It's like my dad says: if she ain't happy, you ain't happy."

"Tch, whatever." Keffer folded his arms and continued to sulk until a change of subject relieved him.

"Man..." Charlie said reverently, eyes still skimming the lofty gutters for a ghost. "That lady sure is smart. She knows all kinds of stuff, huh?"

"Yeah she's real smart." Haru sourly spit into the corner. "Got an answer for everything."

"'cept who she is," Liquel noted.

"Aw, we'll get 'er one'a these days, just you wait," Gary vowed, shaking his own fist at the urban-thatched heavens.

-5-

It had been three hours since Varg passed on the keys to the shop and took off, and that was when Lucca finally determined that the alley outside was safe and clear for the night. She had been waiting for the gang to leave so she could conduct some tests on the acoustics through that wall. Specifically, she was going to find the best niche in the stovepipe to place the other half of the device she brought from home.

After a couple of weeks of conversing with the denizens of the alley, the lady was tired of sitting on the cold and dirty floor just to say her piece. A pillow mitigated the situation somewhat, yet when Lucca was scratching her head for a more viable solution she realized she was wearing it: her helmet was actually a defunct headset, its antennae and microphone (more or less) intact. She only had to recover the missing parts of the two-way radio and a couple of alkaline cells to power them...

"Huh, that should do it!" she declared, shuffling out of the gap in the wall and brushing the grit off her clothes. "If only there was a good way to test it before the boys show up in the morning..."

Bairith rose to the task, politely offering as he sifted through the bricks, 'Allow me. I'll listen outside for you.'

"Oh. Hey, thanks, that's a good idea." Lucca nodded and then found the switch on the headset to open a transmission. "Testing, testing, one-two-three. You read me?"

After a moment, Bairith's smoky head poked back through the wall. 'Yes, although there's a bit of static.'

Lucca grimaced. "Yeah, I don't like how fake it sounds. Maybe if I adjust the squelch..."

Bairith stayed with her another half-hour to make the adjustments, until her voice rang perfectly clean and concealed to the other side. She chortled through the radio in victory. "Nya ha ha! Once again, I am a lady genius. No more hunkering over that draughty old corner. I can pack up and go home, now."

'Charming,' Bairith dryly regarded the prospect. He suddenly lit up with a crafty smirk. 'Would you mind coming outside with me, first? I'd like to show you something.'

"Where, in the alley? Seriously? Wh-" Lucca watched him snake through the wall before she could finish. "Okay..."

Not rushing for the sake of another 'surprise' from one of those brothers, Lucca took enough time to gather her things and make sure the shop was locked up soundly. At length she joined Bairith around the corner, standing beneath a shaft of moonlight that arrowed through the cluttered rooftops. With the nearest streetlight out of range, everything was steeped in midnight indigo that turned the mundane features of the alley into a den of amorphous shadows. It would have been spooky—dangerous, even, for absolutely any thing or one could lurk in this all-inclusive shade—yet for some reason Lucca wasn't bothered past the inconvenience of the excursion. She set her hand on her hip and plainly called out, "All right. What did you want to show me?"

Bairith appeared at her feet, smiling calmly. 'The full moon is out. It's an excellent opportunity to teach you something—tonight will be your first lesson. Are you ready?'

She scoffed at the thought of taking any kind of instruction at this ludicrous hour. "Lesson in what, exactly? Just what do you think you can teach me?"

'Cocky, aren't we? I've told you, we're going to teach you how to manage the darkness.'

"Oh, gee, wow..." she said flatly, not entertaining such a course for another moment. "Sorry, I didn't realize I had signed up for a class in the dark arts. I'm going back to reality now, okay?"

As she turned to leave, Bairith snapped at her back, 'Don't be so foolish to deny the powers of darkness.'

She whirled back to him, ranting, "Oh, I know it exists! Trust me, I've seen it, and I know what it can do, and that's why I don't want anything to do with it. If you expect me to believe that I have the blight, then playing with the darkness can't do anything but make it _worse_. I refuse to end up like Zeal or Ramezia. Count me out."

Bairith glided into her path, arguing sensibly, 'Come now, that's not what I'm proposing at all. How do you expect to resist the blight if you can't grasp the basic principles of darkness? What I'm willing to teach you are techniques that can channel that dark energy to a more useful end than eroding your soul from the inside-out... unless you'd prefer the blight to run its natural course.'

She hesitated, catching her breath and turning away from Bairith's prying look. No, she didn't want that to happen—and she did agree to humor the brothers, but... She sighed, her tool bag slipping off her shoulder and to the ground with a small, defeated _phunk_. "...How? How can I fight it?"

Bairith's relish shone in the blue foxfire of his eyes, and then he took over. 'We're going to start with a basic trick, just to get you acquainted with the technique. Hmm...' He cast a questing look about the alley before nodding towards the back fence, a partition of tall wooden boards. 'I'd like you to read the label on that rubbish bin.'

"Huh? Alright..." She couldn't even see a trash can from there, but she wasn't going to question the command. When she and her friends were first taking instruction in magic, they had to jump through some pretty stupid hoops—reading a label was a cakewalk in comparison. Lucca waded into the pitch dark, kicking and nudging anything in the way until she bumped into a big tin canister. Here was where she finally got a little nervous, wondering if the blob to her right was a crumpled paper bag or a giant rat, or whether the next thing she touched was going to be sticky or sharp. With a bright idea she called on her magic, struck a lick of flame on the tip of her thumb and held it out like a torch.

'Don't use any magic,' Bairith chastened her.

Startled, she snapped her hand back, snuffing the conjured fire. "What? But I need it to see. It's so dark back here, I can't read a thing."

'Take off your glasses.'

"What?" She took back that previous thought—Spekkio's methods were starting to look downright academic compared to this. "I just said I can't see because it's _dark_. How will removing my glasses correct that, besides making me _completely_ blind?"

Bairith's reasoning didn't falter. 'Just do as I say, and you'll see.'

"Tch, fine..." She pocketed the glasses and then watched Bairith's fuzzy visage bob towards her.

'Sit down here with me, would you?' he requested next, his urbane air difficult to challenge. Lucca grudgingly settled on the ground, feeling carefully for anything she would regret finding stuck to the seat of her pants later.

'Good. Try to relax. Now, see... The threads of magic are all around us, as you know by now. Every type of element is in the earth, the sky, and the stars. When you're casting magic, you're taking those threads and weaving them into something you can see and touch, but to reach the darkness, you have to push them aside. Just like the light, darkness is also all around us, all the time, but it is not something to be grasped and shaped—it has to be embraced. You have to feel it in your bones and your soul, and every space in-between.'

Lucca covered a yawn with a gusty sigh. "Is this going somewhere?"

'Shh, you're impatient. I know you're tired, but you need to focus. That feeling of darkness, you already know it.' When this at last seemed to intrigue her, he solemnly elaborated, 'You know it better than your friends because you have the blight, and you're going to know it better than any human that's ever lived because you're not going to be afraid of it. Now, close your eyes and clear your mind, like you're going to cast a spell—and believe me when I say that this is where the similarities to magic are going to end.'

When she did, something cool and insubstantial took her hands and seeped through the skin like a chilly mist. 'I'm going to help you with this one. You need to stay focused, keep your eyes closed and concentrate on the flow of darkness. Commit its course to memory, so that the next time you can do this on your own.'

"Okay..." she shakily breathed, straining to keep calm over the quickening of her heart. She couldn't rationalize her sudden anxiety—it felt juvenile, as if she were about to get stuck with a needle by a doctor. She knew Bairith and his rhetoric well enough by now not to be affected by it, so what was it about the here and now that was making her uneasy?

'Ready?' Lucca felt it before he even finished asking, and she grit her teeth, realizing just then what was unnerving about the proceedings. It was that 'feeling of darkness' she allegedly knew, and if she knew anything about the darkness from the blight, then it was going to be really, _really_-

"Ahhhh-h-h-gh...!" Painful, like getting mauled from the inside out. All at once black fire raked up her leg and side, mingling with the icy adrenaline seizing her lungs and flushing the blood from her face. She doubled over, catching the pavement with her elbows and shuddering under the frigid pinpricks trickling down her spine. Bairith's next words occurred to her as a blur, an alien resonance from another dimension. _'...Gi'a'sho lata deroca...'_

"It burns..." she feebly complained to the sidewalk.

Her 'teacher' was draped about her shoulders like a morbid scarf, his glacial comfort freezing the sweat on her neck. 'It won't kill you. You feel it moving?'

If 'it' was supposed to be a hollow snake slithering through her viscera and up her gullet, then she could definitely feel it, its every scale a snagging fishhook.

'Ignore the pain and draw it out. Don't try to hold it—let it flow. Keep breathing.'

She tried that, the air raspy and hitched in her throat, tripping over syllables that didn't belong—and before she knew what was happening she was reciting those eerie words herself, clinging to them like a sick mantra. "G-Gi'a'sho..."

_'...lata deroca...'  
"...lata deroca..."_

She held still forever, until the squirming sensation stopped and she no longer felt like she was gagging on a miniature black hole.

_'...t'karie.'_

Then she finally heard Bairith again, his placid tone dragging her back to the present. 'Good. Now open your eyes.'

She was pale and trembling, the webbed tracks of her blight smoldering like veins of charcoal, and when she sat up and rubbed her eyes they stung. At first, the only thing that impressed Lucca was that she hadn't thrown up or passed out. Then Bairith's command filtered to the front of her mind and she blinked numbly, trying to gaze through the sheen of purple spots until they coalesced into real shapes—a box, a shard of broken glass, a bottle cap...

Everything in her surroundings was unveiled in ultraviolet detail; there was an upturned milk crate with a crack on the top, a ripple of lime scum at the base of the nearest wall and a thimble spider hiding in the mortar between the bricks. It all looked terribly crisp and real—she was thunderstruck. "...Whoa."

'Can you see?' Bairith had to ask.

She could see, she could see...? Lucca twisted around, looking straight for the garbage can; it bore a bow-tie label with the initials 'R - R.' A delirious giggle slipped out. "Heehe. Can I see? I see great. I can see everything. Wow... I can see better like this than I can in broad daylight."

Bairith chuckled mutely, keeping his enthusiasm bottled with his dignity. 'You should see yourself. Your eyes are glowing.'

She reflexively touched her cheek, nearly forgetting the absence of her glasses. "Really? Like, bioluminescent?"

'Somewhat. It's subtle.'

Lucca stood up (a bit too fast—her head spun for a second) and swept a look around, marveling at every grimy item. She could count the leaves of the folded newspaper left in the trash, the drops of beer clinging to an empty bottle and every striation in the wooden planks of the fence. "This is amazing..."

'Does it still hurt?'

She considered the now-distant ache stemming from her leg and answered, "Kind of... Not as much." He was right; it wasn't like magic at all. Casting magic was like grabbing a cord of light tethered to one's soul and tugging until it gave. This felt more like something tender inside her had just been seared clean, like cauterizing a wound.

'You'll get used to it,' Bairith counseled. 'That's the power of darkness. The more you embrace it, the more resilient you will get, and the stronger you will become.'

Lucca weighed her newfound night-vision with the initial discomfort, leery of the consequences of going further yet enticed by the potential benefits. She wasn't reckless; she wanted to learn more before she tried anything crazy, yet if Bairith was willing to teach her... As a scientist, she could hardly turn down her curiosity. This 'darkness' might be worth some serious study, after all.

"...Huh. I'll keep that in mind."

* * *

A/N: If you think pawning a wheelchair is strange and cruel, chat me up sometime. I got some hella stories. (Two words: prosthetic leg.)


	6. Perception

_10/24/1005:_

_So I woke up this morning to the sound of Toastbot off the side of my bed, yet when I sat up and looked there wasn't any toast in sight_—_until three seconds later, when the two pieces stuck to my ceiling fell down into my lap._

_I thought I fixed that dang spring latch._

-6-

'Brother, wake up.'  
'Grah, aren't I always awake?'  
'Here comes that spider again.'  
'Good for it.'  
'I don't want it getting into the bed. It might bite her. Do take care of it, would you?'  
'Why should I? ...Oh all right, damnit. Let me grab it...'  
'...What are you doing? I said we don't want it in the bed with her.'  
'Relax, sheesh. This'll get her good, heh heh heh...'

It couldn't be helped, some nights—pacing around the house until two in the morning out of a weary, burning discomfort that wouldn't let her lie still and rest. Lucca seemed to recall Bairith promising to make that pain easier for her, yet he hadn't done a thing, instead saying something about her needing to 'learn the basics' first. It was frustrating; she wasn't some novice. She was a genius, a time traveler and the closest thing to a master of fire magic that century would ever know—she didn't need a damn learning curve. She could make a quick study of whatever he threw at her, yet Bairith insisted on taking his time—and hers.

Until he considered her ready, Lucca had to bide those long nights the hard way, waiting for exhaustion to overcome the blight and let her sleep. There was a pang of irony about the ordeal; she knew how to put animals and even some people to sleep via hypnosis (it was an odd hobby, a 'perfectly valid science.' Her former lab rodents and Crono were willing test subjects, although the latter didn't find it quite so amusing once he was made to jump on the kitchen table and cluck like a chicken), yet the technique never worked on herself. The darkness could play mean tricks on her like that, though sometimes it didn't compare to Barnath's machinations.

So it happened that the first morning Lucca didn't set the timer on her toaster robot to wake her, she slept straight through sunrise and arrived at morning late. She opened her eyes and fixed a sedate gaze on the first thing in her line of sight: a brown, spindly, crumpled ball left on her pillow.

Once the 'dust ball' came into focus, she shrieked and clambered out of bed, backside hitting the floor with a hard _thump_.

'Gahahahaha! What? It's dead! Ahahahaha...'

-6-

Glenn kept following the clean-running stream as it narrowed towards its source. He knew he was heading in the right direction—or the wrong one, he feared—because he discovered two more steel traps on the trail (one of them nearly the hard way.) He left them tripped where he found them and pursued the evidence northward.

When daylight got away from him, he had to camp by the stream's pebble-strewn bank, cooking some fish he was lucky enough to skewer with his sword (he loved fish nowadays. His frog self could never stand it) and making a bed of the moss-covered feet of an old tree. It wasn't a favorable experience-just because he made a dwelling in the Cursed Woods didn't mean he thought it was a good idea to sleep outside. The fire he crafted was enough to deter most snooping critters, although he couldn't keep tending it and expect to get any rest. Everything that liked to crawl and slither came out in the dark, and Glenn spent more of his night at half-lidded guard than he did asleep.

That was what be believed, at least, until his chin nodded towards the ground once too many times. At the sound of a deep, animalistic _whuff_ he pulled himself back with a start, eyes darting across the tiny campsite. He looked to the pile of embers just past his feet, and then to the darkness that gnawed away the edges of the surrounding trees. The moon was an unreachable beacon, trickling through the forest canopy and tingeing the ambient fog blue.

Then, dead ahead, he found a pair of eyes-wide, stoic and expectant at once, gazing at him across the remains of his campfire. It was a combination of drowsiness and jaded knighthood that saved him from jumping in fright, and he tensed on the spot, shoulders locking up and hand flexing over his (still unsheathed, never at ease) sword. It took a moment to draw in the apparition's features, underscored with cinder-glow and stripped with starlight, but eventually he descried the lithe bulk of a large cat, its round face and ears squared with him-a tiger if he ever saw one.

It wrinkled its nose inquisitively, nostrils drinking in his murky scent and whiskers glistening over the dusky red bath like the singed wings of a moth. It spoke in neither a growl nor a whimper, its intent masked in shadows, and Glenn watched the beast in subdued awe. He had never seen a feline that big-well, that was not true. On his last escapade through time, the shamaness who taught him how to transform into a dog also taught that cavewoman, Ayla, how to turn into a sabre-toothed goliath, yet Glenn fancied such giant cats extinct by his era. He never expected to be staring one in the face, alone in the pitch moonlight of his home turf.

Then the tiger crept closer, as silent and fluid as an asp, its toes sinking into the hot ashes as if it were fine snow. He could practically feel the heat of its breath and smell the electricity in its fur, yet the moment Glenn edged onto his toes and against his weapon the creature vanished, dispelling in a cloud of smoke and firefly dust.

He bolted to his feet, standing over the fading plumes of cinder-emeralds with his sword clenched at an uncertain angle. He didn't know what just happened; his heart was racing. Was that some sort of trick? A vision? An illusion? Just a dream?

If so, then how was it that he never felt more awake in his life?

In the morning, when Glenn went to sweep away the debris of his campfire and cover his tracks, he found a single, heavy paw print.

-6-

"This is so amazing... I can see the fleas jumping off that rat over there."

It was a repulsive observation, yet in light (or rather, in the darkness) of her enhanced senses she couldn't help her fascination with every passing detail. Barnath twisted a smirk at Lucca as she walked through him, out of the streetlight and into the sheer shade of the alley. 'Still can't get over it, can you?'

Bairith asked to meet her after hours again in the same place she got her first 'lesson,' only this time his brother was accompanying them. Barnath was as impatient about the exercise as she was eager, for reasons Lucca couldn't really express. She didn't know why she looked forward to it. The first time stung like hell, although Bairith was right about one thing: it hurt less and less the more she used it. After only a week of practice, Lucca was able to see in the dark with barely a hitch.

"Sorry, it's just this night vision blows me away. You have no idea what it's like to be half blind your whole life and then suddenly see everything like a hawk." She thumbed her chin, reconsidering, "Or an owl. Owls are nocturnal, so that's a more fitting analogy."

'Are we ready?' Bairith greeted the lot as he appeared through the adjacent wall, to which Barnath grumbled, 'About time.'

Lucca stood over him, hand on her hip and braced to get on with whatever the two had planned. "All right, so what's the deal?"

The rapier's instruction, as usual, was direct yet cryptic. 'Take off your shoes.'

"What?" Lucca shot Bairith a peculiar look. After a beat passed without explanation, she rolled her eyes, sat on the ground and plucked off her boots and socks while muttering, "'Take off your glasses, take off your shoes'... At this rate you're going to have me strip down to my birthday suit and go streaking down Main Avenue."

'I like how even while you're bitching, you're doing it anyway,' Barnath remarked.

He was ignored. Lucca trained her attention on Bairith. "Okay, shoes off. Now what?"

'Stand up, close your eyes and clear your mind.'

She did so, as well as one could while taking counsel from a couple of demons. "Okay..."

'Now, where are you?'

She furrowed her brow, nonplussed. "I'm... in a gross, shady back alley? I think I'm standing on a piece of glass."

'Don't think. Know. Don't limit your senses to those ordinary corporeal ones. That's only what your brain can process. You have to learn to sense your surroundings through every part of your being, including your soul. Anything can be a conduit of the darkness. Stop thinking and just feel it.'

Lucca cracked a grin and nodded at her feet. "With my soles, huh?"

She wasn't sure how, what-with her eyes closed, but she got a hunch of both brothers rolling theirs. 'Hmm, yes, very amusing,' Bairith flatly commented. 'Now, the purpose of this lesson is to heighten your spiritual awareness. You're not going to be allowed to use your sense of sight—I would apply a blindfold, just to be sure.'

"Ah, well...?" Lucca blinked and considered her apparel, deciding to take off her helmet and scarf and tie the latter around her head.

'That'll do,' Bairith allowed, once her vision was thoroughly muffled. 'Barnath is going to hide around this alley. You won't be able to see or hear him, so you'll have to deduce his location from his aura.'

She frowned, vexed by the obscure directions. "His aura? I don't even know what that means. How am I supposed to do that?"

Bairith kept a level tone as he lectured, 'I just told you a minute ago. Try listening, for once, and not with your ears. Place your hand on the wall, keep your feet on the ground and feel for the sound of his aura. The darkness in your heart already knows it.'

She didn't appreciate those implications, but she shut her mouth and obeyed for the sake of expediency. After a few moments in _actual_ darkness, only the gritty stone beneath her palm and between her toes to guide her, she heard Bairith report, 'All right, he's hidden. Where is he?'

Lucca didn't have a clue. How exactly was she supposed to pull this off? Chance? Extra-sensory perception? _Feminine intuition_? She could hack at it with logic, perhaps. If she were Barnath, where would she hide in a place like this? There were two crates, a garbage can and three trash bags in their vicinity. The red-eyed rapier had a hypersensitive sense of smell—how, she would never know, considering ghosts don't have noses, yet a good portion of his whining centered on the phrase 'this stinks'—so she figured he would stay out of the smelly refuse if he could help himself. She made an estimate by her memory and aimed her free hand at the nearest crate.

'You're guessing, stop it,' Bairith chided.

She dropped her arm and made a little noise in her throat to show her annoyance.

'And stop scowling. Anger clouds the mind.'

She couldn't help feeling exasperated. She had to be standing barefoot in this alley for some good reason, yet Bairith wasn't sharing the method to his madness. If the point of this was to master the darkness, then that's what she would try, even if she barely had a grasp of it... yet. She had to figure this out for herself, her own way, and for starters, she wasn't going to listen-she was going to _look_, putting her practice of seeing through the darkness to good use. She peered past the shroud of her disfigured imagination and into herself, into the blight, where flecks of not-magic flowed through veins of dark matter. It had its own pulse, a sickly throb in the pit of her stomach, and when she reached for the outside it reached out after her, flowing like hot tar.

It burned; it always burned. She bent over her stiff arm and drew a short, hissing breath. The pain felt like her only sign of progress. "...ow."

'Stay focused,' Bairith coached her, his voice keen with encouragement.

She reached without moving, without breathing, molten darkness pouring out her fingertips and over the bricks—she could count each one like a spider counting flies in its web. Had she made the mistake to stop and think, she wouldn't believe herself; she felt like a piece of the wall, entwined in the petty vibrations of its every particle. The air battered her with its weight; the shadows had echoes; her hair stood on end. She shifted on her feet, the caress of pavement suddenly liquid and full of ripples—she was tiptoeing on the whole world.

There was a twinge of _red_—that was the only way to describe it—there, under the other crate. Lucca raised her arm and pointed.

The red blotch shifted, sliding into another corner and packing itself behind a trash bag. 'Now where is he?' Bairith prompted.

A piece of her that was still aware of how ludicrous this situation must have looked to an outsider chuckled dimly, as if to lament her sanity. She pointed again. Her target then slithered up the wall like a bloody inkblot.

'...And now?'

It was close enough, so she stuck it with her finger. The red presence shuddered and yelped. 'Gah! Damnit, I wasn't ready yet!'

'Eheh.' She couldn't tell if Bairith was pleased or just amused. 'You can take off the blindfold now.'

Lucca shook off the uncomfortable darkness and found the brothers again with her natural sight, though it was still fringed with negative starbursts. She never felt so light and heavy at the same time; even her grin wobbled. "Heh. How'd I do?"

Bairith nodded approvingly. 'Good, very good. You're picking it up fast.'

That was no surprise; how many times would she have to prove that she was brilliant? She folded her arms and smugly asserted, "Of course I am."

The spirit sniffed, humored. 'Hmm, don't get too cocky. At any rate, that's enough for tonight.'

"That's it? But we've barely done anything," she protested.

Bairith passed back a grin as he wound out of the alley, full of artful promise. 'Oh, don't worry. We'll get to do something fun next time.' Barnath only huffed at that, for once not offering comment.

Lucca gathered her things and started to follow them, but she still felt strange—a little sluggish and disoriented. It was as if that old snakebite had nailed her right leg to the ground, and it took a second to shake the nerves back into it. Perhaps Bairith had the best idea; she didn't want to play any more with this particular brand of fire, for tonight. Eventually she could see well enough without exploiting the darkness to make her way back to the street.

"Oh yeah? If your idea of 'fun' is anything like Barnath's idea of 'funny,' I already have serious reservations about it."


	7. Suspicion

_11/03/1005:_

_The weather's starting to turn. I can tell because the wind is now blowing from the northwest, and that's when it gets into the house and makes the most noise. When I'm in my room it sometimes sounds like voices downstairs, like my parents talking._

_I don't harbor a grudge against the Mystics, but... Just sometimes._

-7-

As much as Lucca despised working for Varg, she never forgot her place. She knew that old man was quite possibly the only person in Truce who would hire the likes of her for her type of work. Her reputation around machines had long ago ensured that nobody would ever take her seriously, much less trust her around heavy tools and flammable materials (just happening to save the world by the same ends didn't seem to mean much—people always found the ugly gossip juicier.) On the same token, she realized that she was the only one in town willing to put up with Varg for any extended amount of time, for wages or else, and that was perfect leverage as far as she was concerned. In a twisted sense, they needed each other; the debt was just a formality.

Yet just because they were stuck together didn't mean she had to take it lying down... all the time. Lucca had her own way of throwing her weight around that shop, and today she was starting with the busted radio she slammed onto the front counter. The impact popped another screw from the torn speaker cover, further splintered the cracked wooden case and released a cloud of dust. Once Varg turned her way with a bemused scowl fit for a carcass dumped in his lap, she said demonstratively, "Stop. Taking. In. Crap."

Varg straightened his newspaper and cinched his hard jaw back into place in time to grunt, "Crap sells."

"No it doesn't!" Lucca pointed at a dilapidated typewriter on a high shelf that was more of an umbrella for dust than merchandise. "What is that? That is crap I put out for you _last year_."

A stray customer snickered behind a rack of fishing lures, and at that Varg drew a testy breath, laid his paper flush on the counter, leaned over and leveled a bony finger at her. "Now you shut up and listen: crap sells. I sold two pieces of crap this morning, and I'll sell two more before I close up today. People come here because they want their crap cheap, n' they don't care how crappy it looks." He then settled back in the crook of his chair like a crocodile sliding back into its pond, picking up his newspaper and never minding her again. "Now get back there, mind your crap and shut the crap up."

...Then again, some days were a losing battle. Lucca conceded with an indignant huff, scooped up the radio and marched back through the curtain. Varg eyed the square puddle of rust left from the radio's base panel. "And clean this crap off my counter, Ashtear!"

"It's your crap!" Lucca fired back, absolutely on her way to not do anything of the sort. "Why don't you _sell it_."

Varg whipped around, his rugged old visage livid with a retort. "Why don't I sell-"

He was cut short by a damningly familiar voice. "Whoa, Ashtear? As in, Taban Ashtear?"

Lucca stopped and twisted a look of alarm past the curtain, where the eavesdropping customer approached Varg at the counter. She hadn't thought much of him at first glance, young and gangly with a thick headband and grimy, sleeveless shirt. Aside from being tragically underdressed for the autumn chill (not to mention society in general) she mistook him for just another anonymous hoodlum, and it wasn't until he opened his mouth that she recognized him—he was one of _the_ hoodlums, Gary's supplier.

She avoided his line of sight and feigned working while Varg simmered down to answer, "Grr... Yeah, that's his little girl."

Keffer cracked a laugh between derision and awe. "Seriously? The blacksmith's crazy daughter? Isn't she the one who built that thing on wheels that tore up the market that one year? And the thing that made Princess Nadia disappear? And that other thing that destroyed the Tillers' shed?"

"And my roof," Varg never forgot, his tone long-suffering if informative. Lucca rolled her eyes—as if _he_ was the one slaving away like a pet monster kept down in the basement. "Yeah, yeah, that's her."

"Wow, and you let her work for you?" Unbridled astonishment never sounded so much like slander. "Don't you worry about, uh..."

"I don't worry about nothin'," Varg snapped before Keffer could finish whatever wild speculation just slipped his tongue. "When _she stays in her place and keeps quiet_," he bellowed at the back room, before uncoiling and admitting to the front, sedately, "She does good work. Fixes e'rything around this shop."

Lucca was going to pretend she didn't hear Varg backhandedly sticking up for her; her brain just didn't know how to process that. She had a radio to repair, besides (all the contacts were tarnished and clogged with dirt, and one of the wires was loose.) She was also going to pretend she didn't bite back a smile there—just a little one.

Varg then called him out with the same blunt gall he used on his employee, "Now're you done stealin' from me or do ya want to snoop around some more?"

She could practically _hear_ Keffer blanch. "Uhh...!" A guilty silence was followed by the _clink_ of some fishing lures being piled on the table. "I was only holdin' on to 'em, you know? Keeping 'em safe."

"In your damn pocket?"

"Uhh... yeah."

"Get the hell outta here, ya little sperm."

"...old crab," Keffer muttered loudly as he plodded out, the jingle of the door's bell graciously censoring the rest of his comment.

Lucca didn't have to fish too hard for her next distraction, at any rate. A boisterous round of 'wall ball' was being carried out in the alley, the rhythmic thumping of a rubber ball against the bricks punctuated with whoops of victory and anguish.

"Ohhhh yeeeeaaaaaah, two for me!"  
"Ow, that was my damn knee!"  
"Man up or pussy out, little boys."  
"I'll pussy out your mo—oaf!"  
"Ahahahah!"

The match was eventually broken when Liquel stepped aside and whined, "Aw man, I don't like this game no more."

Gary caught the rebounding ball, rolled it off his elbow, punted it into the corner and sneered, "Then quit losin'."

"Then quit playin' like a dirty cheater!" Liquel riposted.

Gary forced the smaller boy to step down with a long-reaching shove. "Bein' taller than you ain't cheating! I'm just naturally gifted to be better than you."

"In that case everybody's more naturally gifted than Liquel," Haru grumbled.

Liquel hopped to Haru now, one small fist bared. "What did you say?"

Not to be ignored when antagonizing his peers, Gary stepped in and declared with enough volume to be obscene, "He called you short, short stack!"

"Ey, only'body call short stack is the girls when they see you drop your drawers," Liquel rebuffed.

Charlie, who had just finished wiping off his scraped knee, broke into a ruddy, winded chuckle. "Ahahaha."

("Now now,") the lady interjected before Gary got a mind to repay insult with injury. ("Being short is by no means a handicap. Some of the most accomplished people in history were vertically challenged, and they made the most of it. In fact, the brave knight who defeated the Magus was too short to even punch him on the chin.") Of course, Magus was a titan among men and Frog still could've made up that reach threefold in a single leap—and once he turned back into a human that wasn't even necessary—but those were details best omitted.

"Aha!" Liquel crowed. "Maybe I'm just naturally destined for greatness, asshole."

The interruption seemed to take the steam out of Gary, at least. He let the snub go and flexed against his usual spot on the wall. "Aw, shuddup. You're lucky I'm too worn out from wiping the floor with you to kick your ass again."

Haru reclaimed the palm-sized ball and dribbled it off the ground. "Haha com'on, Liquel, play one more game."

Liquel waved off the invitation. "Hell no, I'm done."

"Aww, don't be such a sore loser," Haru provoked him, bouncing the ball closer and closer to Liquel's heels. "Com'on, humor me."

"I'll humor you!" he reflexively lashed back, and then pouted at his feet. "Aw shit, that backfired."

This time Charlie's brother was the one laughing, and Gary joined him. "Ahahaha!"

"Dude, you so need to learn when to say 'your mom'," Charlie weighed in with a slow headshake.

Gary nodded and shifted in place, subtly alerting the others to a newcomer. "Hey 'sup, Keffer."

Keffer strolled up to the gang, drew a paper bag out of one of his bulky pockets and tossed it to Charlie. "Sup guys. Wall ball?"

Gary spit into the corner. "Not anymore, since Liquel's dick is too short."

"Hey hey!"

Keffer's lackadaisical grin and swagger rolled over Liquel's fuming. "Well shit, that never stopped you guys before. Oh, so guess what?"

Something about the sly enthusiasm in that question set Lucca on edge, and she started dreading something she should have realized minutes ago. Keffer's next query only confirmed it. "You guys figure out who the wall lady is yet?"

"Oh... shit..." she swore softly over the broken radio, rousing Barnath from his nap inside a flower pot. 'Gwah? What?'

The guys brightened, eager if wary of any surprises from Keffer. "No, why?"

"My mom thinks she's an angel," Liquel chipped in.

"Your mom also thinks that chicken nuggets come from baby chickens," Gary sneered.

"Hey shuttup, you don't know that they don't!"

"I'm preeeetty damn sure."

Keffer spoke over them, "_Anyway_, dingleberries, I thought I had a lead, but it didn't pan out."

Haru tipped one eyebrow at him, intrigued. "Oh?"

Keffer tossed a thumb at the wall behind his shoulder. "You know this pawn shop right here?"

Barnath caught wind of Lucca's dilemma and laughed outright at her mortified expression. 'Gwaha! Oh shit.'

"Mister Varg's?"

"Yeah. You know he has a girl working there with him?"

Haru's eyebrows switched positions. "No shit? I've never seen 'er around."

Keffer shrugged. "She stays in the back. Varg says she does his maintenance work."

Haru lowered an incredulous look. "A _girl_ doing maintenance? Varg must be really hard up for help."

"So you thought this could be the lady?" Charlie wondered.

"Yeah, but I then I heard her talking to Mr. Varg, and..." Keffer snorted with amused disbelief. "There's no way. Besides, you won't believe who she is."

"Who, the wall lady?"

Haru shot Liquel a sidelong smirk. "No you nutbag, the pawn shop girl." He nodded back to Keffer. "So, who is it?"

Keffer folded his arms behind his head and beamed with mischief. "You remember the blacksmith's daughter, Ashtear?"

The implications hit the alley like a shockwave, waves of revulsion washing over the gang in various shades. Haru sputtered for two seconds before coughing up, "Shit, you mean Booger Lane?"

"Geez. Mr. Varg lets that wacko work for him?" Gary asked.

Haru shook his head in amazement. "Yeah, I'm surprised the place ain't burned to the ground yet. I thought she just holed up on that island and built crazy exploding robots all day."

"Haha yeah, no way _she's_ the lady," Charlie concurred.

"No shit, right?" Keffer pitched a curious look into Haru's corner. "So why do you guys call 'er Booger?"

'That IS a good question...' Barnath murmured, yet Lucca ignored him, too far tuned in to the last conversation she should be overhearing.

Gary fired right away, "Cuz she's a booger, why else? She was always a booger, all goin' up in school."

Haru gazed skyward, invoking a nostalgic air. "Man, though, that takes me back. Booger was always such a soggy bitch."

"Yeah no shit," Gary continued, riled up for a rant now. "She always had this like, smartass explanation for everything, like anybody even fuckin' asked. Like she's better than everybody just 'cuz she's smart. Fuck her noise. And she'll wonder why nobody ever wanted to hang the fuck around."

"I thought it was because everybody that hung around got their shit blown up," Liquel remarked.

Charlie sniggered. "Haha yeah, holy shit, right? Remember that fuckin' thing she made—uh... what was it, like a robot that could shoot sparks? That made those fuckin' dog noises?"

Haru screwed up a double-take. "What, like it _barked_?"

"I don't think it was _supposed_ to shoot sparks..." Liquel carefully noted.

Gary spit again. "Yeah, like anybody understands what the fuck any of those things were _supposed_ to do, 'sides be weird and explosive."

Barnath watched the victim of their tirade cringe and cast a look down into the gutted radio box on the bench, as if she could crawl inside it. She hadn't yet said a word, which was peculiar for someone with a temper almost as caloric as his own, and somehow that irked the rapier more than the juvenile rambling outside. 'You're going to just sit here and let them ream you like that?'

Lucca gave a watery, mirthless laugh, dodging eye contact with the bellicose spirit and hiding behind thick lenses. "What can I say without giving myself away? Besides, it's insightful to learn why I never made friends. It's what my mom would have called an 'eye-opening experience'."

'Sheesh. Sure you don't mean eye-gouging? I'm embarrassed just sittin' next to your bitch ass.'

Haru backed up, suddenly remembering his audience. "Oh yeah, no offense to you, lady. You're nothin' like Booger. You're smart but you're cool about it."

The lady hesitated, swallowed and then spoke, her voice drained of its clever vigor. ('True, such braggadocio is unbecoming of the lady. If one cannot say something helpful or kind, it is best not to speak.')

Liquel nodded. "Word, lady." Charlie raised an empty beer bottle in a shoddy toast. "Damn straight."

Barnath was still staring her down with muddled disapproval, as if waiting for a decent response. "No..." She shook her head, pushed her glasses back up her nose and composed herself with a sullen sigh. "It's okay. I'm relieved, actually."

Barnath's frown grew deeper, further confounded. 'Relieved?'

"Sure, this works out better for me. They'll never suspect I'm the lady, now."

That said, Lucca stooped over the workbench and consoled her bruised ego with the repair job, vowing against any further distractions until Charlie said, low and sober, "They still say she killed her parents, you know."

The screwdriver froze in her hand. Haru spoke next, sharp and censuring. "Shut the hell up."

Charlie recoiled, defending himself second-hand. "What? Seriously, that's what they say."

"I thought she was in pretty tight with Princess Nadia, though. Crono's friend, and all," Liquel mentioned, as if that fact made a case.

"Yeah, that's probably the only reason she ain't in prison for murder!" Charlie affirmed.

"Com'on, that's bullshit," Haru rejected the notion.

Charlie held his hands in the air, disavowing his source. "Hey, just what people are sayin'. Say it's kinda funny how she was the only one who survived."

"People are retarded," Haru countered. "Booger was always weird, but she ain't no killer."

"I dunno, man, I can kinda see it. Maybe she's one'a them unstable types. I bet she just snapped or something," Liquel supposed.

Gary rubbed his nose and contributed an uneasy shrug. "Ehhh... sounds like bullshit to me, too."

"Like some shit Laci would cook up, y'know, gossiping with her damn girlfriends," Keffer agreed.

"Dude, forget it," Haru insisted. "Crono would kick your ass, he heard you talkin' that crap."

Liquel snapped, quicker than his cohorts, "Crono ain't here! Shit, he ain't anywhere 'round here no more, since he shacked up with that fine princ-ass."

"Can you blame him?" Gary remarked.

Liquel scuffed the ground with this foot, admitting his frustration. "Shit, no. Just wish I could score a piece of that action. Lucky bastard."

Gary thumped his chest emphatically. "Yeah I know. Guy needs to remember his old pals, share some'a that love."

Charlie furrowed his brow, lost in some bad imagery. "I don't think Marle swings that way..."

Haru swiftly knuckled Charlie's side as Gary explained, "No you dumbsack, I'm talkin' about all those fine court maids! You know that castle loaded with more choice pussy than the cat lady's house. King all runnin' a harem up in that shiz."

Liquel wrinkled his nose. "Ew man, the cat lady is fuckin' nasty."

"Shut up, you know what I mean."

Charlie veered back to his original story. "Well anyway, it didn't have to be on purpose, neither—killin' those folks, y'know. Coulda been an accident. You know how many times those robots of Booger's or whatever the hell have blown up or run berserk? She's made guns before, too. Real ones."

His brother remained unconvinced. "Still, that would be fucked up. And how do you account for the Mystics?"

"Fuck the Mystics," Liquel belted out, wagging a disdainful look at the ground. "Fuckin' shame."

There was a pause. Aiming to lighten the mood, Haru threw up to the rooftops, "Hey lady, true or false: fuck the Mystics."

"Heheh."

Barnath had never witnessed a person _wilting_ like that before, as slowly and painfully as a daisy under the desert sun. At that last prompt she took off her helmet, set it aside, slumped over the bench and buried her face in her arms, as pale and torpid as the undead. The rapier prodded her with his tail. 'You're not letting the crap those guys are saying get to you, are you?'

"Aw, she ain't answerin'."  
"Maybe she got tired listenin' to your whiny-ass voice and fell asleep."  
"Heheheh."  
"But angels don't go to sleep!"  
"Really? Says who?"  
"Says Saint Tulips of Kiss My Ass."

Lucca refused to budge. Barnath's muzzle twitched with what could almost be mistaken for compassion. 'Er... are you all right?'

"Heh. Yeah..." her voice filtered through her sleeve, weak and suspiciously damp. "'s just funny, is all."

'Funny?' Barnath bit back in an abrasive tone that begged the question, 'Have you cracked your nut?'

As if to answer that—_yes, maybe, always, does it matter anymore?—_she started sobbing with laughter.


	8. Hunting

_11/13/1005:_

_I have a big project on the drawing board, just you wait and see, but this week I got a little side-tracked in my study of electromagnetism and started tinkering with microwave propagation. Currently there aren't any uses for microwave technology in the (alas, primitive) industries of this era, but I believe the potential applications are interesting—I've already started a schematic for a cavity magnetron with a much smaller resonant frequency than the ones I've made before. Once that's done I'll have to brainstorm a while._

_It's nice to always be getting ideas like this, even when I'm feeling low. I always have something to keep my mind from wandering off. Focus, discipline, all that good rot. The brain is a muscle too! Metaphorically, of course. You have to keep exercising it to stay in shape, you know._

_Bairith says I'm only distracting myself from the obvious. ...And the inevitable._

-8-

He thought something was wrong, at first. The strange noise that morning was the only reason he bothered to go up and check.

Now Barnath sat by the drowsing form of his charge, and the sleep-drugged moans that first concerned him were now the subject of curious speculation. He couldn't read any distress on her brow, yet her cheeks were burning and her lips slightly parted with addled murmurs as she embraced her pillow a little too fondly.

"Mmn... hmmmn..."

His brother eventually joined him, sliding out from their usual nesting place beneath the bed. 'She's having a hell of a dream, isn't she?' Barnath greeted him, one cocked eye following her shifting leg beneath the covers. 'What do you think it's about?'

'Hmm...?' Bairith flexed in a feigned yawn and then moved in, sweeping his wispy form down Lucca's side (he got a lukewarm shiver in response, yet she didn't wake.) At length he coyly reported back, 'I'd say it's a whom, rather than a what.'

Barnath reared with astonishment. 'You can read her dreams?'

Bairith batted him down with a flick of his tail. 'Of course not, just her vitality. Increased heart rate, respiration, temperature and blood flow to the pelvic region are indicative of arousal. Judging by the evidence, I would wager she's dreaming about someone in a particularly carnal context.'

Barnath took only a second to put it together, and then he lit up with deviant glee. 'Ohhh, a sexy dream! Ohoho, this is too good—I have to ruin it.'

Bairith rolled his eyes, leaving him to his own devices, and drifted back down to the floor. 'As you please...'

Lucca gave a tiny, wistful sigh and buried herself in her fantasy, snugly oblivious. The spirit deliberated until an idea hatched through a wicked grin. He snaked up to her ear, cleared his shady windpipe and then barked in a loud, shrewish mockery of Varg, _'Oi, Ashtear! Slackin' off again?'_

She jolted up like a dizzy fawn, eyes sprung wide as she flopped over the bed. She lay like a spooked turtle for a moment, sitting on her arms and legs with the pillow clutched to her chest, until the shock wore off and Barnath's raucous laughter dawned on her.

'Geheheh! So...' Barnath waggled his eyebrows lewdly. 'Who were you dreaming about?'

For once too exasperated for words, Lucca dealt him a flushed, smoldering look and violently brushed him off the bed with her foot. The rapier retreated, cackling all the way, and the best response occurred to her afterward. "Ugh, like I'm about to tell you! None of your business."

Back under the bed, Bairith faced his cohort with an unimpressed expression. 'I hope you're happy.'

'I'm tickled,' Barnath said matter-of-factly, quivering with relish.

The bed shook once in protest. "I can still hear you down there! _Please_, I'm trying to sleep."

'You were trying to do more than that a minute ago!' Barnath shot back.

A pillow got stuffed in his space.

-8-

Glenn had never tracked anything in the woods this far north, yet the unfamiliar terrain didn't bother him as much as apparently extensive trail of the mysterious trapper. His sprung trap count was up to five, and he started to consider the possibility that there was more than one culprit, yet he never found any sign of civilization to encourage that—no other campsites, and not even another shelter like his own. He was acquainted enough with the local geography to know what lied ahead, at any rate; the rust-baked facets of Mount Derre were beaming over the trees like a daylit moon, and the clean-running stream was guiding him indirectly towards it. The western slopes of the mountain were famous for gold mines that were now old and plundered, while the eastern side was too far steeped in the curse of the woods to be worth cultivating.

As soon as Glenn cleared the trees he took himself back. He had stepped into a wide field that was not too natural yet not too recent, judging by the uniform plot of overgrown grass. Suddenly stripped of the jungle shade, the stark change dazzled him, and he had to shield his eyes from the high sun. Yet nothing startled him more than the buildings—there were _buildings_—cabins made from stripped logs and thatched with animal hides and tarpaulin. About a hundred yards away, nearly a dozen of the single-story affairs were clustered around a common ground that had been trampled into a rustic brown.

"There's a village here?" Glenn said aloud in his moment of awe, at once amazed that it was possible and puzzled that he had never noticed it before. Off to his right a pair of figures picked their heads up over the field and turned his way, equally bewildered if hardly as vocal about it. To Glenn's alarm, they were Mystics, and they fixed him with a set of dim, stony looks that were impossible to decipher from a distance.

He had stumbled into a _Mystic village_. The more he thought about it, the less it surprised him—it might've been inevitable that he uncover this place, right where such activity was least suspected. Immediately since the war, most surviving Mystics fled to the bushes and outlands to avoid human detection. Glenn knew that a city of their own, Medina, would eventually rise from the rubble of Magus's Keep, but that was ahead of his time. It was time-traveler's paranoia, perhaps, but he sometimes felt compelled to pretend he knew nothing of such futurity.

Keeping his sword in mind if not in hand, Glenn approached the two slowly, wading through the grass until he reached a tiny picket fence skirting a cabbage patch. The green imp and yellow hench tending it were leaning on a rake and a shovel, respectively, and wearing their slack-jawed regard for the stranger as casually as their dirt-smeared overalls. On closer inspection their expressions weren't necessarily hostile, just... weary and confused.

What to do, then? Offer a hand, or his sword? Salutations? Nobody moved for several seconds. The afternoon sun was starting to feel oppressive, and Glenn scratched a sweaty itch on the back of his neck. "Ah... hello."

The gardeners were barely fazed, merely tipping their squinty gawking to a fresh angle. "Hi," the imp said flatly, as if testing the word on an alien species. He wasn't sure which was more nagging, now: the heat or the silence. Glenn cleared his throat as he sorted the questions flitting through his head (_who are you, what is this place, what are you doing here_), trying to pick the one that made him sound the least threatening or stupid.

Luckily, the imp spared him the effort. "You new here?"

"...Yes," Glenn said lamely, wincing at his sluggish reflexes—so much for not sounding stupid. Perhaps he was suffering a heat stroke. Perhaps he just didn't know what to make of all this yet.

The imp nodded and took up his rake while the hench suddenly reanimated, working his shovel around the weeds. "That's cool. You should stop by Chief's house, introduce yourself."

The knight relaxed a notch. "Chief? He's in charge here?"

"Chief n' Jenna," the hench clarified. He pointed to a cabin to the northeast, one with a curved, peaked roof and its back to the mountain. "Their place is right o'er there."

"Oh, but they're in a meeting right now," the imp recalled.

The hench curled its smooth brow and broad, drooping lip, perplexed. "Really? Meetin' who?"

The imp met his companion with a strangely intense look, his tiny features sharpening. "I said they're in a _meeting_ right now."

"Oh. _Ohhh_," the hench grasped this as thickly as he could anything, and he went back to work before addressing Glenn again. "Yeah buddy, you might want to wait a while on that."

Glenn straightened with a quick sigh and nodded back, more sure of his bearings, now. If he could find out from this 'Chief' what those steel traps were doing in his neck of the woods, surely they could negotiate a deal to be rid of them. These other two villagers seemed reasonable enough, at least—for Mystics. "I'm sure they won't mind a little interruption. I just have a question. It'll only take a minute."

As Glenn strode off, the hench snorted and the imp bowed over his rake, simply remarking, "Oh boy. We warned ya."

He didn't proceed directly to the chief, but rather trekked through the village, drinking in the scenery. It was a modest country affair, the houses raw yet well kempt and the accompanying structures sturdy if skeletal, utilitarian. There was a stone well on the edge of the commons and an iron roast spit large enough to barbeque a horse set up in the middle, a pit of sedimentary ash resting beneath. There were other people up and about as well, and Glenn encountered two small children playing around a clothesline, a gargoyle and a little girl—a human.

Glenn stopped and wondered at the odd pair from a distance until another human, a woman, stepped out from behind the adjacent house, toting a pile of dripping linens. She caught Glenn's stare and passed him a polite nod as the children flocked to her side and began picking through the laundry. The knight shook off his surprise and moved along, but then crossed paths with an elderly goblin cradling a basket of flowers, who offered a gruff if appreciative, "Greetings," as Glenn balked long enough for her to pass.

He headed onward, misconceptions scrambling in his head. This wasn't just some Mystic village, after all—it was... Glenn didn't know. Part of him shouldn't have been flabbergasted, and knew better, but not even in the far and far less war-torn future could Mystics and humans be found dwelling in apparent harmony—not like _this_. Glenn picked his way to the chief's house, fighting not to recall how many henches he had left bludgeoned to death on the scarlet carpet of a cathedral, or how many imps he had punted off waterfalls and into churning ravines, or how many times he had slashed through hordes of goblins and gargoyles, painting rainbows of gore across the morbid brick palette of castle walls...

Chief's house was somewhat distinctive for being the only one with a porch. It managed to be large and welcoming without looking grand, and a plain wooden rocking chair teetered over the planks of the raised floor. The front door was open—well, it just wasn't there, a curtain of glass beads and knotted yarn strung up in its place. Glenn pushed it aside and entered, slowly taking stock of the warm interior. The house had a circular build, with a wiry spiral staircase heading into rafters strewn with feathery pelts, dangling cookware and rope hammocks. Two large windows were positioned to catch a cross-breeze, although wax paper shades were drawn over each, only catching the impression of stifling daylight.

Instantly he was struck with the aroma of burning witch oil, spiced meat, tanned dust and quagblossom petals. There were candles in various stages of decline all over the shelves and table, a portrait of a lady in a regal green dress tacked to the wall beneath a mounted scimitar with a ruby-studded hilt, and a large, stuffed, amorphous piece of furniture that must have been for reclining, since that's how he found the house's two occupants.

"Oho_ohh_... They say strawberries are the most _sensuous_ fruit."

"Hrmn, the wilder, the better..."

Glenn held back, eyes stuck wide with an injection of horror. Directly ahead, a hunk of green flesh was sitting supine, head tilted back and ape-like jaws hanging in an enraptured grin as a beautiful dark-haired woman perched on his lap and dangled a piece of fruit around one of his lower tusks. They were half dressed, to Glenn's half-disgust and half-relief. The couple caught wind of their visitor and stared back with a mix of aggravation (mostly from the ogre) and unabashed inquiry (from the woman) that made the rest of Glenn's hair stand on end. It was another moment before either made a move, the woman sliding to her feet and adjusting her loose skirt while the ogre sat back and glared at Glenn past his exposed gut and brawny arms.

Despite her simmering partner the woman remained cool and poised, planting her hands on her hips and flashing Glenn a debonair smirk. "Hello there. Are you lost?"

"Ah... um..." Glenn swallowed and found his footing again. "I apologize. I didn't mean to interrupt you, ah, that..." He bungled up his own excuse, trying to find a way to say '_I meant to interrupt something else'_ that wasn't rude and intrusive, anyway.

"Well you have," she said smartly, direct and unruffled. "So you might as well state your business." The ogre behind her snorted, and she reached back to pat his knee. "Don't mind Chief. He's just a little grumpy when he misses his snack time."

"Damnit, Jenna," the ogre grumbled as he lumbered upright and grabbed the leather vest off the back of... Glenn still wasn't sure if that giant plush lump was a bed or a sofa. Chief dressed himself and then resumed glowering like a guard dog at Jenna's heels.

Jenna's appearance was fascinating in itself, tall and sleek with a creamy complexion and hair that fell in long, smooth waves. She wore the flimsy, flowing garb of a gypsy and ornaments to match, gold lightly jingling around her wrists, ankles and ears. Everything about her demeanor exuded a wily, feminine wit that was commanding and enticing at once. She flicked her chin forward and Glenn snapped to attention. "You're a newcomer, yes? What's your name?"

He was about to introduce himself, 'Sir Glenn of Guardia.' It was a title he bore with neither too much shame nor too much pride—it was simply _his_, something he earned a way no other knight could (nor, at times, should.) The words were on the tip of his tongue, but then he took another hefty look at Chief and held it, realizing that this might be a place where such affiliations were prudently reserved. "It's Glenn, madam."

She smiled, affectedly charmed, and held a hand to her breast. "Glenn, I am Miss Jenna. It is a pleasure to meet you. I trust you found our village by chance? This is a place where anyone can find solace from the bitter tide of war, no matter who they are or where they come from."

"You're refugees, then," Glenn realized, and Chief gave another indignant snort, this time rolling his eyes.

"That's such a _humane_ way of putting it," Jenna said more eloquently. "I say that because you look like a soldier." At his impressed look she ambled closer and nodded over his shoulder—her perfume smelled of roses and pine moss. "The sword gave it away. Although you do have that particular _air_ about you, the one of a man that knows how to fight."

"Well, I have done some service..." Glenn hedged the truth, avoiding another singeing look from Chief. Jenna's appraisal was unnerving enough—he had to get to his point before she whisked it from him with those spidery eyelashes and long red fingernails, like a witch drawing reagents for a potion. "I actually live in the woods to the south, by myself. I came here to investigate the strange traps I found in the area."

Jenna stood back and pressed a finger to her bottom lip, musing, "Traps?"

Chief's gravelly voice filled the room. "He must mean the ones me and Scarab put out for the wolves."

"You're trapping wolves?" Glenn asked, slightly aghast. He considered the one he rescued and found it hard to believe that those were the intended targets.

Jenna thoughtfully glanced aside with a soft _tsk_. "Ah yes, the wolves. Damn pests, the lot of them. They've been tearing through this village from the start. We've managed to run off all the other nasty creatures, but those mongrels keep coming back. Chief makes a job of exterminating them whenever he can."

"I didn't know," was all Glenn could say—not that he was about to confess that he released one of those 'damn pests' and compromised a good deal of their wolf-hunting campaign just on the way. His sympathy for the wild animal was quickly replaced with guilt for hampering the progress of an innocent village, one that was trying to carve out a sanctuary from a hostile society in a duly hostile environment. A knightly compulsion to make amends took over, all other aspects be damned, and he frowned and set a determined look for Jenna. "Is there anything I can do to help?"

She turned back with another half-lidded smile. "All we ask of the people who stay here is to make themselves useful—to give their talents and skills back to the village if they can. If you think you can help us with our wolf infestation..." Her fingertips trickled down Glenn's arm, gracefully persuasive, and gazing into her gimlet garnet eyes felt like sealing a deal. "...You can stay as long as you like."

The knight errant held his breath, captivated by the offer that was too quaint yet generous to resist. He heard his heart thump in his ears like the knock of a door and reflexively stepped back, shaking off the odd spell. Chief was still drilling him from across the room with a cynical scowl and a pair of steady eyes, yet Jenna's confident grin didn't waver—the invitation was hanging under his nose.

Glenn nodded and extended his hand. "I shall do what I can, Miss Jenna."

She clasped it and nodded back, smug with authority and bright with business. "In that case, welcome to Outlier."

-8-

"So, this is where you guys are always sneaking off to..."

Lucca had honestly been wondering about that, the way one or the other brother would occasionally drift out of touch and disappear for hours. It's not that she _missed_ the pesky little heathens, by a long shot, but they were always reticent about _where_ they had gone, and that would pique anyone's suspicion.

It happened as incidentally as any of their diversions; Lucca was about to spend a night at home working on one of her projects when Bairith suggested she put all that 'restless energy' to a different use. After some goading she was drawn outdoors, and before long she had followed the rapiers all the way past town and into the forest. It was late, the clouds a gossamer halo about a crescent moon, and most of the stars had dissolved into a smothering pitch.

Although it would normally be too dark to navigate, Lucca tread a path she had been versed with since childhood, back when the wild and narrow corridors of oak and bramble felt like magical shortcuts. Even so, she kept her blighted vision open for any fresh developments that might trip her way.

Barnath squiggled along a protruding root while Lucca squirmed beneath a low-hanging branch and its spider web. 'Oh yeah, all kinds of good stuff to eat here.'

She shuffled clear and kept a wary eye on the arachnid, grimacing. "You guys _eat_?"

Bairith followed his brother at her other side. 'Of course we do. We're not ghosts, you know. We require nourishment just as you do.'

'Oh, not quite the same as you fleshbags, eheheh,' Barnath chortled.

She tried not to laugh, herself; something about the concept was a little ridiculous. "Well what do rapiers eat, then?"

Bairith's response was impeccably straight. 'Whatever you're about to catch for us.'

Lucca spun so fast a twig snapped under her heel. "What?"

He indicated the surrounding wood with a flourish of his tail. 'These are our hunting grounds, so-to-speak. I wanted to take you out here to practice what we taught you earlier. You're going to use your powers of perception with the darkness to track down our next meal.'

She scoffed at the indignity of getting coerced into what was essentially a thinly veiled lunch errand. "You are kidding me."

'We kid you not,' Bairith quipped as Barnath sniggered.

"Uh-huh. And what exactly am I looking for?"

'Anything with a pulse," Barnath vaguely instructed, but then started again, suddenly finicky, 'Oh, but not those damn mushroom heads! I hate those things.'

'Hmm, yes, a warm-blooded creature will suffice—the larger the better,' Bairith agreed.

She looked the latter dead-on and asked, "When did I become your grocery shopper?"

'I'd say the moment you agreed to go out with us tonight,' Bairith coolly retorted.

If Barnath had hands, he could have clapped them impatiently. 'Yeah, so chop-chop, missy! I'm starvin' here.'

"I'll feed my foot up your ass..." Lucca muttered as she turned to go, but then Bairith's voice reached out and caught her.

'Ah, a suggestion...' The blue spirit leaned a weighty look towards her feet, speaking of those.

She stared at her toes for a long moment before the inference sank in. "My shoes," she said incredulously.

'It'll help,' Bairith remarked with a funny air that let her know she would rue ignoring his advice, one way or another.

Lucca complied with her fair share of complaints, sitting down to shuck off shoes and socks. "Good grief, if I step on an asp and get myself stung to death out here..."

'If you use your senses properly, that won't be an issue, will it?' Bairith nestled around the discarded footwear with a promise of safekeeping, and then nodded her along. 'Good luck.'

She paced until the brothers were out of sight before finally stopping to wonder how she was going to handle this assignment. "Okay, problem solving time..." she murmured into the black web of the forest, and then pinched her nose and sighed, already flustered. She was strongly tempted to simply go home, but now Bairith was sitting on her shoes as some kind of demented collateral, and even though it wouldn't take any effort to snatch them back, she would never hear the end of walking out on one of his 'lessons,' the goal of which was purportedly to 'help' her.

It was okay; she only had to _find_ a woodland creature. She wasn't about to catch or kill one, much less eat it—in whatever grotesque sense those rapiers ate anything. Trying to imagine the process was only the start of a headache. If the brothers were supposedly so adept at catching their own grub in this forest, they wouldn't need her to finish the job, at any rate.

That only left her tracking skills in question... Lucca began to mentally inventory the known inhabitants of the wood: bellbirds, eaglets, kestrels, buzzards, beetles, badgers, jackals, rolys, owls, hetakes, toads, bears, snakes, spiders—she shuddered. Okay, that was enough inventory.

She placed her hand on the nearest trunk, considering the next step. Bairith had her traipsing in the woods barefoot so that she'd resort to the darkness, which was fine. She could play that game again, closing her eyes and skimming her fingers and toes over the arboreal veins of the earth. Over the past few weeks she grew more and more comfortable with the prickly pulse of darkness, learning the feel of her surroundings by a sixth touch that could be more discerning than sight, sound and smell combined. It was like seeing in negative, everything possessing its own signature color—that 'aura' Bairith mentioned. Nonetheless, it was a stilted sensation, divorcing one form of perception from several, and that made it difficult to focus on one thing and everything at once.

She burned, it burned, it stank so much her nose itched—the tree, massive and hoary with lichen, its respiration sluggish yet effervescent, green like mould. A single leaf broke from its canopy and she twitched; she saw where it kissed the ground without even opening her eyes. She started walking, slowly, lids cracked open and testing everything—the dirt was rusty; every spent leaf was crinkled and black; the worms were lipoid-yellow. A centipede brushed her hand and she jerked away.

It was the process of elimination from there on out; anything not redolent of trees, soil and all its trappings was subject to inspection. Pressing ahead, Lucca noticed a fiery red wisp trailing at a distance. That's funny; Barnath was following her. Just as well. She carefully inched along until she bumped into a landmark she actually recognized, and Lucca chuckled, patting the willow tree's side. "Lookie there, old pal..." she whispered as she found the same worn footholds her younger self used to scale like a flight of stairs. She hopped up and saddled over a bough, cozying up to the tree like an old friend.

'Hey! I didn't say you could take a break,' Barnath snipped from below.

Lucca stuck her tongue out at him. "I'm _scouting_," she teased.

'I'll scout you!' he rebounded, the threat completely ineffectual and he knew it. 'Gah, it'll take all night for food to turn up like this.'

She didn't mind him, rather reminiscing as she toyed with the stringy leaves, "I love this old tree. I used to sit up here all the time when I was little. Crono and I once tried to build a fort in it, heh."

'Ya don't say,' Barnath grumbled into the toadstools with obvious disinterest.

"Yeah, but it didn't work out. I guess we were too lazy to find enough material to..." Lucca felt a twinge of deep blue in the back of her head, and she turned around to look for it. Just below was the rim of a black pond sprouting from a bouldery rise, and across the water she spied a quadrupedal mass that was definitely not Bairith. Her thoughts stilled as she eased onto the balls of her feet and grabbed the branch above for balance, focusing on the life-form—a creature bundled in fur with sinewy legs, a bushy tail and a long snout. It was a beast, dog-like in build and cat-like in composure. Her night-eyes could pick out the white flecks of its canines as it lapped at the edge of the pond, drinking with one spaded ear tuned in her direction.

She was amazed; it was a real wild hound, gorgeous in its rarity. Its dark, lithe figure was sometimes considered more of a spectre—the stuff of fairy tales—than a legitimate species by the locals, and Lucca felt privileged just to be able to see it in person.

Barnath was keen to its scent as well, and he perked up with excitement. 'Ohhh, that one's good! Get that one.'

As if it _heard him_—and Lucca couldn't say how—the hound abruptly snapped at him, a venomous growl roiling its hackles. Lucca grit her teeth with a fretful hiss, getting a bad idea of how this was going to end. Before she could pray that Barnath not open his mouth and say any more, the rapier blinked at the hound and delivered a baffled, 'What the hell're you loo-"

With a rabid spark the beast charged, crossing the pond in a single bound and skidding beneath Lucca's perch so fast she yelped despite herself. It ravaged the bushes with its tearing maw, leaves and spittle flying as it scoured them for a spirit that was impossible to grasp. Barnath cringed around its flank, his cries of distress possibly genuine but just too much for Lucca to believe—he was probably more annoyed at the assault than actually endangered. 'Fucking hell this mutt's gone ballistic, somebody get it o—aaahhh what the fuck hell shit...!'

Lucca was only trying to rally her senses and figure out how to stop the thing when a tuft of red that she had neglected skittered over her knuckles. It got one quick glance—_oh god spider_—before she screamed, flung it away and lost her grip, falling out of the tree. She caught the ground flailing, the impact jamming her shoulder, yet the moment the jolt of pain subsided she realized she was facing a bigger problem.

A bigger problem with _teeth_. Lucca froze, staring straight into the foaming jowls of a monster that looked mad for blood. Its eyes were feral-bright, its breath stank like rotting blue and its hair bristled in a savage mane, yet it seemed to recoil at her arrival, tip-toeing the line between fight or flight as finely as she was—all they needed was a little push. Lucca didn't dare make a move.

Barnath scrambled to the rescue, diving behind her back and then poking out from behind his human shield to taunt, 'Neener-neener, you son of a bi-'

Those might as well have been his last words, because the hound wouldn't let him finish the thought, springing like a mouse trap with a hideous snarl. Lucca threw up everything in a defensive reflex—hands, knees, skin and nails and spirit that flinched at the prospect of dying on one's back like a dog to a dog in the middle of nothing, not even fighting for her life (_why didn't she bring a gun?_) and that was it. The spell came as fast as a whip lash, a balloon of fire knocking the hound off its feet.

Lucca watched it fly away and collapse into a heap of fluffy charcoal, embers teeming in its nostrils and steam rising from its pelt as it whimpered and shriveled like a burnt out matchstick. She lay on her side, panting and thunderstruck, arm still outstretched and tingling with magic that hadn't seen proper use in ages.

Barnath uttered a simple and almost reverent, 'Damn.' He then approached the fallen beast and treated it with a long, rasping lick from hip to shoulder, ghost-like tongue sampling its death throes. An ecstatic grin split his ghastly visage. 'Ohoho, good stuff. Bairith! Get your sorry hide over here. Dinner is _served_.'

"Are you gonna...?" Lucca feebly asked, too dazed and winded from the encounter to pursue the question further. She sat up and tried to collect her senses (and sanity) while the other brother arrived and surveyed the damage. She received a curt comment that was something between congratulations and gratitude, and then was summarily ignored by the hungry rapiers.

It was like watching an exotic foreign ritual; Lucca had never seen anything quite like it. Bairith twined his serpentine figure about the animal's neck like a noose, while Barnath did the same to its chest. One subtle nod passed to the other and they constricted in tandem—the hound released a deep, keening moan that gave Lucca a chill. She then descried something on the fringe of her night-sight—that deep, sea blue aura, seeping from the hound's body in a heavy mist. It was this that the rapiers consumed, suckling from the beast's ears and nose and fur, wherever the sapphire draught pooled into bloody ambrosia. They fed on the passing spirit like a couple of leeches, growing fat with quicksilver in the moonlight.

Something sickly stirred in her gut. Lucca looked on like a spectator to an execution, repulsed yet strangely drawn to it. She felt something damp on the top of her lip, reached to wipe it and drew back a dark-colored streak, which she stared at a long moment, bemused.

Her nose was bleeding. It smelled like blue.

'You should have some.'

Lucca snapped out of it, looking up to find Barnath draped over the hound's side and peering at her with a drunkenly sated expression. "Huh?"

'You feel it, don't you?' His mellow grin turned salacious. 'That dark craving.'

Bairith picked his head up to elaborate, 'You might be building resilience to the blight, but using the darkness to do so still drains your spirit, leaving you weak. If you feed, you can replenish it.'

Lucca clambered to her feet, almost comically repelled by the notion. "_Feed_? Me? On animals?"

The brothers, however, were completely serious. 'Yes, like we do.'

Her wit tempered her outrage, granting her the good sense to cross her arms and turn her back. "What am I supposed to be, a vampire? No thanks, really."

'That or a fiend.' It wasn't a threat; it was a warning, and that disturbed Lucca the most.

She refused to consider it and walked off, making sure it didn't sound like a request when she announced, "I'm going home, okay?"

As she left to find her shoes, Bairith's last words rang through a hollow part of the woods that only echoed darkness.

'Suit yourself. The hunger will only get worse.'


	9. Pet Projects

_11/18/1005:_

_I've found a way to convert electromagnetic radiation to heat energy in matter via dipole rotation, from a magnetron no bigger than my hand—but that was the easy part. Here comes the fun part: I used that to create an oven powered by electricity that utilizes microwave radiation (it's non-ionizing, don't worry) to super-heat water molecules in the food and cook anything nigh-instantly. Behold!_

_Well okay, you can't behold because you're just a journal, but Alfador III beheld it so hard he crapped himself (the noise seems to scare him.) Took less than three hundred seconds to melt a rice ball and make a hot dog explode! No fire involved what-so-ever. (Crono ate it all anyway, but I no longer underestimate what that fool will consider edible.) First Toastbot, now this. I'm going to reinvent the kitchen, at this rate. I wonder what I should call it... the dielectric oven? Or something._

_Incidentally, I experimented with different materials in the oven, and as I expected, some give off a lot more than heat when bombarded with electrons. I wouldn't recommend leaving anything metallic in there, including pans and forks. The oven's reaction to metal utensils is positively electrifying (ho ho ho, I'm so punny.)_

_...Seriously though, don't do it._

-9-

The disarrayed papers, tools and metal bits on her desk that evening at least had a common purpose, if no less order than usual.

Outsiders had long ago given up trying to make sense of the sundry, exotic devices Lucca Ashtear built from scratch or scraps or both, cutting and welding and molding a wayward form of art out of heaps of glass and metal she plundered from the scrap yard in town. Sometimes the plundering was quite literal, whenever her wages were exhausted and she ran out of legitimate means to acquire raw materials. There was a junkyard dog by the name of Greaser that she and an old partner in crime (whose name was stricken from her diary to preserve his identity, if not his innocence) had made sport of eluding, long before Barnath and Bairith crept into her life.

Of the brothers, Bairith was the one polite enough to feign interest in her inventions, even though his real fascination lied in her methods rather than her ingenuity. The planning stage was carried out almost entirely in her head, with her pen only touching the paper as an afterthought, and even then the notes were comprised of such inscrutable engineering jargon as to be virtually worthless to anyone but her—and perhaps some over-zealous researchers in the far future. Lucca did her best to keep Jerad in mind and write a little more coherently, but that was only for projects she considered worthy of his attention—which were sadly few and far between.

After years of lessons learned the hard way through scorched clothes and busted walls, Lucca's process of creation was narrowed to rely on only a marginal amount of trial and error, calculations honed to perfect precision before any testing began. Yet that was the only part that interested Barnath, since it invited all the mishaps. If something was about to shoot sparks, combust or collapse he had a nose for it, rushing to the scene to be the first to heckle her failures.

His sense of disaster was tingling that evening as he amused himself with the other spectator on the far end of the desk, which sat in its bed of wood shavings and fiddled with its stubby ears. Whether or not the gerbil recognized Barnath's presence was a matter of toying with it; the rapier reveled in sweeping his tail through the cage and watching the animal shiver and squirm in confusion.

Lucca paused from running cable from the machine on her desk to the capacitor brick on the floor to glimpse Barnath practically salivating over her lab gerbil. "...Why are you looking at Alfador like that?" she asked slowly, discomfited.

The rapier didn't peel his rapacious gaze away from the rodent as he questioned, 'When are you going to eat this thing?'

She started, nearly dropping the cable altogether. "What?"

'It's fat enough, isn't it? I don't think these things get any bigger.'

"Are you insane? I'm not eating Alfador! He's my pet."

'Tsk, such a waste,' Barnath clucked. 'It looks delicious.'

"Get your greedy little eyes off him," she snipped as she picked up her work again. Lucca had already gone through two other Alfador's, each on less-than-pleasant terms, and was not inclined to feed the third one to anybody, least of all a soul-leeching rapier.

'What?' Barnath recoiled with exaggerated injury. 'I'm thinking for you! Honest, cross my heart and hope to die.'

"You don't have a heart, in any sense of the word."

'Tch, so harsh.'

Lucca stood back and clapped the dust off her hands, surveying the spread of cables and fuse boxes rigged to what looked like a polished onyx vase set in an wire-spoked wheel garnished with steel bolts, like a leaden wreath—Barnath couldn't figure it out beyond that, and he wasn't about to ask. "All right! Almost done with this part. I just need to test how well this baby conducts. So now I can... uh..." She padded around the crossed wires, lost for a moment. "...Damn."

Bairith appeared on the desk in time to ask, 'What's wrong?'

"Nothing, I'm just out of insulating tape. I guess I don't really _need_ it, but that leaves a risk of shock up to... oh, say, twelve percent."

'Those aren't... such bad odds?' Barnath uncertainly weighed in.

"Well, I'm testing at low amperage anyway, and dry skin resists at around a hundred thousand ohms, so even if I make contact by accident..." She fixed her glasses, mulling over the hazard. "Yeah, I should be okay. Probably."

'You're honestly considering the risk of shocking yourself here,' Bairith said in mordant disbelief.

To his further amazement she began rationalizing out loud, "It would be a good time to test my resilience to electricity? According to your description, the darkness has matter-repellent properties, and the blight is an extension of darkness, right? It might make the ultimate insulator." She rolled a look the other way, reconsidering. "...Or those same properties forge a vacuum that draw electrons across it, making it the ultimate conductor. But you think I would have noticed something like that by now through increased incidences of static shock alone." She finally gave a compromising shrug. "I guess it's still a gamble, huh?"

Bairith turned aside with a quintessentially sarcastic, 'Oh, I love where this logic is going.'  
Barnath's glow-worm eyes lit up like a child's before a birthday cake. 'Do it.'

It was too late to dissuade her, at any rate; she was bustling around the room and making last-minute adjustments. "Double check, double check..." she murmured, too excited to see her handiwork in action to let the chance of personal injury deter her—even so, she gave the fuses and regulator another look, just to be on the safe side.

Bairith's disdain sounded dangerously close to concern as he uttered, 'I can't watch.'

"Good, I need you to watch the voltmeter instead to see how high it spikes." She indicated the gauge plugged into the device, and then rolled up her sleeves and approached the power switch on the desk. "All right, here we go."

Lucca spared one more moment to make sure her feet were grounded on the wooden floor (she owned a pair of rubber gloves, somewhere, but in the interest of a true test she glanced over them, finding something about taking her chances exhilarating—she was a scientist, not a gambler. Or a daredevil. Really.) She then braced herself with a deep breath. "Okay... for science."

She flipped the tiny switch. Immediately the whole room blinked, lamps dimming as the capacitor took on an angry pitch. Alfador squealed and fled into his milk carton burrow as a hot blue scorpion-tail sprang out of the metalwork and stung Lucca's hand. She jumped back with a sharp cry and crumpled to the floor. The hum of energizing parts culminated with a muffled tin _clack_ and then abruptly died, a breaker snuffing the current.

Barnath and Bairith gasped at where she had fallen, dazzled and dismayed, respectively. The entire incident hadn't lasted three seconds, and before either brother could fuss over the outcome, a string of gritted curses issued from the floor.

"..."

Barnath swelled with mirth while Bairith deflated with relief. The latter peered over the edge of the desk, wondering, 'Great Lord. Where did you learn to swear like that?'

She was still rocking on her knees and nursing her singed hand as she growled back, "Arrhhh... your mother!"

'Guys in the alley.'

'Ah.'

Lucca had lost count of how many times she nearly killed herself 'for science.'

-9-

"Worst?"

"Worst."

"In the world, or just Truce?"

"Geez, how many shitters you sat on, man?"

"Well there's this one back in Choras, I'm thinkin'..."

Lucca wasn't sure which was worse: the discussion outside the wall or the one past the curtain, yet once Liquel started an anecdote about an outhouse he once visited that had 'all the boards glued together with slimy green shit,' it became a tough contest that Varg and the strange customer were losing—as if anybody could 'win'.

"Oh yes, I mighty fine 'preciate..." Varg was polishing up his act so thoroughly his dentures were squeaking, and Lucca had to wonder who was important enough to merit the shopkeeper's gross courtesy. She figured that it didn't really matter; the sound of Varg verbally throwing himself at this man's feet was enough to make her ill already, and if she got up to watch this rare and degrading performance it would probably push her over the brink.

"Oh no, Officer, I understand..."

So, it was the police. That explained a thing or two; the local pawnshop could be considered a hot spot for stolen goods, and once in a great while was subject to investigation. Varg always put up his best (still hideous) front for authorities. Lucca wished she had been paying a little more attention to their conversation, in case she could relate to any missing items, but as it was she resumed repairing a bicycle and minded her own business, as Varg was wont to tell her to do.

"You have a fine day, y'hear?"

...Until the door bell signaled the policeman's departure. Lucca decided to play ignorant and get a jab in at her boss at the same time, shouting to the front, "Hey, Varg! I've got some superslick back here, in case you need help prying your lips off that customer's ass."

Varg slipped back into his typically acerbic manners instantly. "Oi, Ashtear! I've got some duct tape up here, in case you need help shutting your damn trap."

On a shelf over her head, Bairith grinned. 'I think you two are really warming up to each other.'

"Oh, go to hell," Lucca flippantly responded, to both.

Bairith's smirk leveled as he remarked with droll candidness, 'Been there. Rather dull, actually.'

Before Lucca could puzzle over that, her headset picked up some urgent scrambling.

"Oh shit."

"What?"

"The fuckin' pigs. Clean this shit up."

To the gang's credit, they were able to throw together an innocent facade in a heartbeat, disguising their enterprise behind an impromptu round of wall ball. By the fourth bounce all the evidence of their discolored dealings was shuffled under their feet.

"Oh yeah can't take this, can't take it!"

"Got your back!"

"Ow damnit Gary, that was my knee-"

"Quit being a pussy and eat my big bouncy ball, bitch."

As the odd, tall gentleman approached the group, they were seemingly too immersed in their game to notice him. He greeted the lot with a, "Good day, fellas," that managed to jarr the match to a rolling stop despite the affable intonation. The gang slowly assumed territorial postures at their end of the alley as they stared the intruder down.

The man cleared his throat in the face of the cold reception, not affording to be intimidated. He reached one foot towards the abandoned rubber ball, pressing it under the heel of his shiny loafer. "Wall ball, is it?

The rest of his attire was atypical of a policeman, with a dull brown trench coat and dusty fedora, yet Gary was the first to see through it. "Sure is, _Officer_. What'chya doing down this end of the street, ya don't mind me asking?"

"Ah, well..." The policeman relaxed his ruse, letting the flap of his coat hang open to reveal his badge. As he tipped his hat he flashed a strange grin that matched his voice, easygoing yet crafty. "It's Detective, actually. I only heard some noise down this way, so I thought I'd check out the racket for myself."

Gary spoke for the gang while Haru and Liquel kept their lips tight and Charlie scratched his ear and pretended to be fascinated by something behind the trashcan. "Oh yeah? Well, you caught us. Been guilty of playin' wall ball all day."

"I see that..." The visitor's smile didn't fade, but rather adapted like a chameleon sensing a shift in mood. "I don't mean you boys any trouble." With a deft flick of the foot, the ball bounced straight off the pavement and into his hand. "Actually, I was wondering if you had heard anything about the burglaries going down this neighborhood lately."

"No shit?" Gary nonchalantly spit into the corner, stalling long enough to consider the not-yet-mutual problem. "Ain't heard nuthin' about that."

"Really?" the detective pressed, spinning the ball off his fingertips. "A couple of witnesses say it's a gang of punks, perhaps some poor, troubled youths off the street..."

"Like we would know shit about that, huh?" Haru caustically remarked, as if to take offense. "Bad shit happens all the time down these streets."

"Yeah, Detective, I'd watch out around here if I were you," Gary casually warned. "Some'a them troubled youths about, you know, might try to jump you. We wouldn't want to get mixed up with types like that."

"Yeah yeah," Liquel joined in, unable to contain his exuberance any longer. "Maybe you know, it's like the lady says, you don't go askin' for trouble and you don't find none. Ain't that right, lady?" he hailed the rooftops while Gary and Haru masked groans in their hands.

Lucca's head hit the nearest blunt surface—the edge of the workbench—in a fit (fortunately her helmet took the brunt of it.) Why were these careless jerks _calling her out_ in front of the law?

The detective followed Liquel's searching look with an inquisitive smirk. "Lady?"

"Uhh..." Haru started some feckless defense, but the lady swiftly elected to speak for herself rather than have any more words put in her mouth. ("The lady wouldn't have anything to do with such business.")

The man reeled from the voice, bewildered. He was only fazed a second, however, and his flying look alighted back on the gang, honestly curious. "Where is that coming from?"

Gary forced a straight face. "Who knows. She lives in the walls, like an angel."

Liquel stuck up a serious lip and nodded. "Angel of the alley, word."

Haru aimed a knowing look at the detective, posing as some kind of street sage. "She's real smart, gives advice and shit. Maybe you should take 'er word for it and start lookin' for some other gang of punks."

"Yeah like she says, burglaries ain't no business of ours," Gary reinforced their stand.

"Is that so?" the detective countered, tilting a shrewd eye towards the eaves. "Would this lady mind if I asked her what _is_ your business down here, then?"

Haru flinched and Charlie's eyes widened anxiously, no one sure what to expect in response. The patron of the wall barely hesitated, however, her reply ringing with noble humor. ("The lady might feel affronted by an attempt to interrogate her companions behind their backs and to their faces at the same time, although the paradox is certainly amusing.")

Liquel cracked an audacious grin, Charlie's blush ripened as he choked on a gag, Gary's expression glinted smugly, and Haru dipped towards the ground with a strangled laugh. "...Huh," was all the man could say, undeniably intrigued yet at a loss. After a thoughtful pause he bounced the ball off to the gang, where Charlie fumbled to catch it. "I'm sorry for interrupting, then. Enjoy your ball, boys. Good day, lady." He then turned and strolled away, taking that beguiling smile with him.

A tense silence accompanied his departure, and then the alley sighed with relief. "Lady," Haru addressed their invisible benefactor. "If I could give you five right now, I so would."

"That was close, guys," Charlie timorously remarked.

Gary scuffed a bellicose foot after the detective. "Shit, damn pigs, stickin' their snout up ins."

"Wonder what he talkin' about, burglaries 'round here and shit," Liquel wondered.

Their informed leader shrugged, crossed his arms and settled back against the wall. "Maybe Keffer knows. I know I didn't hear shit."

Lucca finished ratcheting the bicycle's kickstand back into place and then stood up, wiping the oil off her hands. Barnath rose out of a shaded spot on the bench behind her. 'So, you're assisting drug dealers, now,' he snidely determined.

"I'm not assisting anything," she returned, hardly provoked. "It's not about the drugs."

Barnath watched her stash the bicycle in the corner and then reclaim her notebook from the bag on the other end of the bench. 'Oh really?'

"Really." She produced a pencil and wagged it at the rapier pointedly. "I could not give a damn what those idiots are selling out in that alley. It's about integrity."

He snorted, faint red plumes jetting from his nostrils like a sneezing dragon. 'Bull shit.'

"It's true," Lucca asserted as she turned away from him and back to writing. "The lady's work is confidential. What goes through this wall does not come back out."

-9-

Barnath and Bairith both left the shop ahead of her, and Lucca should have taken that as a sign of trouble, since she was rarely without the company of at least one of them. As it was she enjoyed the reprieve, the solitude granting her a clear head that was nearly as refreshing as the crisp autumn evening. She took a leisurely pace home, drinking in the setting sun and quiet chill of the descending night. Although daylight had sunk into the sea, it wasn't entirely dark by the time she reached her front door, the clouds dusted with embers that permeated her lawn with an otherworldly red hue. It vaguely reminded her of red gates, but then only vaguely—she didn't let her memories spoil the serene mood.

She budged the door open, set her tools down, turned on a lamp, walked past the fuzzy lump emitting a panting noise on the floor and then into the hallway.

Stopped at the stairs. Listened again. Walked backwards into the living room. Looked dead at the strange new addition to her motley decor, which stared right back, still panting.

It was a dog—large, shaggy-haired and long-muzzled, with white fur blotting its dark snout and running between its eyes and down its chest as if it had stuck its nose into a jar of bleach and quaffed it as sloppily as possible. Its angular ears stood at clumsy attention and its tail swept the floor in a single stroke of greeting as it regarded Lucca with a pair of staid, lurid blue eyes.

_How did a dog get inside her house_, she had to ask, although the first words to surface were, "What the hell?"

She only expected an answer in the most absurd reaches of her mind, and that's exactly where Bairith responded. _'It's a dog.'_

She gaped at the creature, which merely cocked an expectant look. Lucca shook her head, the implications plucking a perturbed chord. "What? No. _No_. Where did you even get that? Is that somebody's pet? Did you steal it?"

The dog shook its head, adopting a sober look of denial that looked so incongruous on a dog it only further convinced Lucca that she was going insane. As much as it didn't help, she started drilling Bairith—the dog, possessed—with questions. "Well then, is it clean? Does it have any diseases? Parasites? Tapeworms? _Fleas_? Are you getting fleas in my damn carpet?"

The dog yawned, tuning out the tirade. Lucca stamped a foot. "Bairith...!" She sighed and pinched her nose, stepping back from the quandary to cool off. When she opened her eyes again, the dog was unfortunately still in her reality. She let her temper fall slack with a shrug. "Well what, you don't expect me to feed you now, do you?"

At this the dog's ears turned high and forward, its tongue wagging from a goofy grin.

"Oh hell no," she shot that notion down. "I do not have any food a dog can eat. I don't even have food a human can eat." To wit, she stormed into the kitchen and opened the pantry, the dog briskly following. She gave the barren, crumb-riddled shelves a terse appraisal. "I've got... crackers, ketchup, a bag of flour... uh, peanut butter... See? Nothing."

The dog licked its chops and whined. As infuriating as it was to look down and see Bairith imposing on her like this, her heart softened a little to the helpless canine peering back up. She plucked a glass jar off the shelf and screwed it open. "...On second thought, have some peanut butter."

With a wicked caprice—partly to teach the rapier a lesson and partly for her own entertainment—she daubed some of the sticky stuff on top of the dog's nose. The animal gave a confused groan, sniffed with interest and then struggled to lick it clean, crossing its eyes and contorting its face and jaws. Lucca walked away while it was distracted, snickering. "Sucker."

* * *

A/N: Yeah, a little more of Lucca's work/home life, because I know that's exciting as hell. *sarcastocough* This story is going somewhere, I promise.

I was asked again whether or not this is AU and I suppose I haven't made that clear, so I'll very simply say yes and probably add a notation to the summary, too.

And thanks to some icypals who own a certain dog who shall not be named to protect the guilty. (I can attest that he is an outstanding fetch-hound, nonetheless.)


	10. Gravity

_11-24-1005:_

_So, I have a new pet? Question mark, full stop. Bairith brought a stray dog into the house. Male, large, indeterminate breed, unspecified origin. Smells like a wet sock. Seems content and fully capable of letting himself in and out of my house at will, through means I have yet to ascertain. I don't know to what nefarious ends Bairith plans to use him, yet._

_Last night I kept dreaming about these two goldfish that wouldn't stay alive no matter how hard I tried to care for them. It probably would've helped if I stopped trying to keep them in a pair of rubber boots. My dreams aren't notable for making a lot of sense. I haven't even owned a goldfish since I was a little kid, and then not for long_—_I think it lasted about a week? It was just amazing how attached I'd become to those little guys. You'd think they were my last friends in the world, and it broke my heart when I couldn't save them._

_You know you've got it bad when your dreams get so traumatic that you have to sit up every few hours and take a break from sleeping. Over __fish__. I just said that out loud, and it sounds even crazier than it did in my head._

-10-

A _flip-flap_ from the attic woke Barnath, who peeked out from beneath the bed and into the murky morning. Although the sky was taking on a cerulean blush, the tree outside the window was not yet lit with the sun's golden strokes. He cocked a listening gaze towards the ceiling and whispered, 'Something's up there.'

Bairith cracked one eye at him and then coiled back into his dormant form with a murmur. 'It's only him.'

Barnath sniffed at the lazy reply and his brother's superior gift of perception. 'Who? What?' He took a moment to alight on his best guess. 'Oh, that stupid boy? Isn't it freakishly early for him to be over here?'

'Mmn,' Bairith responded with what might be a shrug.

Barnath let him be and roamed the room. The house was otherwise silent, the wind that typically moaned through the rafters abated, and not even their charge was breathing loudly enough to be overheard (Lucca would insist she doesn't snore, besides.) Tiny, scratchy footfalls tracked overhead, all the way to the flimsy hatch over the indoor balcony. When Barnath heard it being pushed aside, he slid to the door to peer underneath. He glimpsed a mop of yellow-brown feathers dropping to the floor and then the breezy flare of thunder-bright flame heralding a transformation spell—the whole transition was just quiet enough to be graceful.

In another moment the door edged open and a red-headed young man slipped into the room, tip-toeing around the clutter and whatever illusion of privacy the bedroom's occupant might have had. His sly gait didn't go unnoticed by the rapier, who spun around his feet and asked, 'The hell are you sneaking around for?'

He naturally went unheard. Barnath was halfheartedly hoping his charge wake up to spoil the proceedings, but the question roused Bairith instead, who crawled out into the open to wonder the same thing. They watched the young man stalk around the bed, his expression breaking into a crafty grin as he spied the girl snoozing under the covers. He reached into a pouch at his belt, withdrew a piece of crumpled paper blotted with ink and then gingerly placed it on her pillow, right in front of her nose. When Barnath squinted, he saw that the paper was artfully folded into a bug-like shape, with eight little legs and a red spot scribbled on its back.

Bairith narrowed an incredulous look that rolled into a scoff. 'Oh, for the love of...'

Barnath hushed him with a serpent's grin, suddenly invested in the ruse.

He paced to the opposite side of the bed, wincing as an open book crackled beneath his foot—fortunately to no effect. He then crouched to the floor as if to hide, reached over the top of the blanket and nudged Lucca in the back. After a few more prods the girl shifted and yawned, coming around like a sloth. She blinked slowly, drinking in the odd dark shape on her pillow until it sharpened into focus.

Two beats later, she shrieked and jumped, falling off the bed and on top of the boy ducking for cover. He gave a winded cry and scrambled free, propping himself against the wall and rubbing his bruised shoulder. Lucca recovered a moment later, throwing her back against the side of the bed and trying to size up the body-shaped cushion that caught her. "You!"

He returned a goofy smile that shortly bubbled into cackling, and it took a second longer for Lucca to realize she had been tricked. Outrage dawned and she grabbed her pillow, slinging it at his head. "You...!"

He tumbled out of the way and bolted for the stairs, and Lucca shouted over his laughter as she gave chase, "Crono! You freaking jerk...!"

'Gwahaha! Oh, bravo,' Barnath lauded, tickled by the successful prank. 'I take back whatever I've said about that boy. I like him.'

-10-

At the northwest corner of Outlier, where the woods loomed thicker and darker over the picket-wire fence than it did the village's other boundaries, a chicken coop stood beneath the listing girth of a great oak. It had thin, flimsy planks that were spaced just widely enough for the hens to wedge their obtuse heads between them. Glenn discovered one such fowl screeching in distress while a young boy and gargoyle huddled over it, watching the entire shack tremble with the bird's thrashing.

The pair of kids—ten or maybe twelve years old—were rough and spindly-limbed, dirt and grass sticking from the frayed patches of their clothes. The gargoyle was sporting a straw farmer's hat that nearly dropped to the ground as he doubled over with laughter, while his companion gnawed the end of a reed, as unmoved by the spectacle as a cow. Between the hen's racket and the gargoyle's braying, no one noticed Glenn approach.

"Eheheh, eheheh, eeheheh!"

The boy cuffed his friend's shoulder. "Quit laughin' already and do somethin'. Stupid thing's gonna break its neck and Chitter'll whip us."

The gargoyle caught his breath and stood back, massaging his sore ribs. "I'm not gettin' my finger bit off again! Dumb chicken already got me once."

"That's 'cause you didn't grab 'er right."

"Well then you do it," the gargoyle sneered back.

The boy screwed up an impish scowl. "Fine, maybe I wi-"

"Hey there," Glenn interjected, watching the two whirl to him with mixed expressions of guilt and surprise. Glenn gave them a humored smile and nodded at the writhing head attached to an obscured chicken. He discerned ripples of dusty white and red through the gaping slats, where the walls shed sun-dried flakes of paint over the other hens. "Got a problem, there?"

"Ahh... maybe," the boy grudgingly admitted. Without another prompt Glenn opened the door to the shack and snooped around, minding his step around the addled birds. The chicken in distress was hard to miss—it was the one churning up straw like a fluffy, furious eggbeater. When Glenn clasped its feet and neck the hen kept drumming its wings against the wall, issuing another downpour of dust and paint. He couldn't help recall that the wolf he handled recently was a lot more cooperative, and when he plucked the chicken free he worried for a moment that its head had popped clean off. After a reassuring cluck, Glenn set it down and left the coop in peace.

Back outside, the boy was sizing him up with one squished eye, while the gargoyle flashed a canine in what looked more like a nervous tick than anything aggressive. The former crossed his arms, affecting a cocky sort of nonchalance that probably didn't amuse his elders. "We coulda taken care of it. Thanks anyway, mister."

"It's Glenn," he offered along with a friendly hand. The boy reared back with a critical demeanor that was taught not to trust strangers. The gargoyle, on the other hand, surprised Glenn by reaching past his friend and returning the gesture with an eager grin. "Thank you, Mister Glenn! It's nice to meet'chya."

Once his cohort accepted Glenn, the first boy seemed to mellow. "Hey. I'm Bert, and this here's Alf. You're new here, huh? Never seen you around."

Glenn looked the pair over and smiled again, more and more bewildered by everyone he met in this village (and to think, if any of the other knights back home saw a human and Mystic child fraternizing like so, they would've gone into bloody convulsions.) "Ahm, that's right. I am a newcomer. So..." He scratched his neck and looked around for a natural segue—he only came over because he was curious and still exploring, not because he particularly wanted to chat it up with a couple of kids. "You two watch the chickens, huh?"

Bert gruffly spit on the ground. "Nothin' to it, really."

Alf wrung his hands and shrugged, still too skittish to look Glenn in the eye for more than a second. "We just make sure they don't all kill each other."

"You're a soldier, huh," Bert jumped to that conclusion. "'s why you got that sword."

Glenn nodded, unable to deny it (admitting that he was actually a knight, not just a soldier, still didn't feel like a safe option.) "It's true. I served King Guardia XXI back in the war."

"Yeah, our folks fought in the war, too," Alf related.

"Really?" Glenn asked, shifting his feet as if he could literally walk around this touchy subject. "And now you live here with them?"

"Nope. They dead," Bert said with a cool sobriety that shocked Glenn.

"Oh." What could he say? He'd seen men and Mystic alike fall in the tide of battle, and the parents of these two could have been any of them. Even if he had, by the slightest chance, encountered the gargoyle that fathered Alf, he wasn't about to feel responsible for making him an orphan—everyone loses to war. Still, his sympathy couldn't be so easily suppressed. "I'm sorry to hear that."

"Nothin' to be sorry over. Miss Grim take us in. You met her yet? She's the flower lady." To that point, Bert spit on a dandelion. "Beats us all proper like a regular parent, anyhow. Now we're bona-fide chicken-watchers."

Alf shrugged. "Beats working in the gardens, at least."

"Tch. At least the farmers an' Chitter n' Scarab get their big share at supper, you know? 'cause they do real man's work. There's no respect for a couple'a chicken-watchers. We get treated like some scruffy kids."

"Hey, guard duty is important," Glenn tried to give their work some credit. "It takes a lot more skill and dedication than you might think. Chickens can't fend off the foxes and jackals by themselves, after all."

"I suppose," Bert relented. "Not that there's a point. Don't see much'a those types in the daytime, anyhow."

"They come out at night, the bad critters," Alf explained.

"Yeah, like the damn wolves," Bert cursed, and Alf threw him a wild, cringing look.

Glenn wasn't about to mind their language, either; it really wasn't his place. "Right, Miss Jenna told me about your wolf problem. Do they trouble this village often?"

"Every week or so, who's to say. Some nights they come and some nights they don't. Leave a bloody mess every time, though."

Alf twitched to a high-strung tune. "They come in groups, like, like an army or somethin'."

"Shut up Alf," Bert censured him. "Armies are big—lot bigger than the wolves got. You've never even seen a real one, so how would you know?"

"Neither have you!"

Glenn was struck with an appalling thought. "It's just you two boys watching the chickens all night?"

"Nah," Bert assured him. "They make us kids come in at night. Me, Alf, Lily, everybody."

The chickens' security wasn't all that crucial, Glenn knew, but a nagging sense of duty pressed him to ask, "The adults watch the chickens at night, then?"

"Nope, nobody watches 'em." Bert nodded at the shack. "We bolt that door right there real good and leave 'em. They don't need watchin' while they asleep."

That was somehow more disconcerting. "Really? That doesn't sound like a very sound idea, leaving them vulnerable like that. I'd imagine chickens would make a prime target for wolves. Don't you ever lose any?"

Alf passed a subdued look to Bert, who treated Glenn to a hard pause. "The wolves don't come for the chickens."

-10-

'Tonight we're going to learn to defy your perception of gravity.'

Bairith's next lesson took Lucca back to their usual time and place: the alley by the shop after hours. Lucca crossed her arms and looked down at him, intrigued if forever skeptical. "I'm listening."

'That's good, because you'll need those ears,' Bairith said slyly. 'Tell me, which part of your body controls your sense of balance?'

She took only a moment's thought before answering, "The vestibular system. It's a group of sensory organs that make up part of the inner ear. They're filled with fluid that shifts when you move. If they're upset too much, you get dizzy and lose your balance."

'Precisely,' Bairith chimed. 'That's the very system we're going to be fooling.'

Barnath smirked. 'How do you damn nerds know all this?'

"Because it's science, and science is always fascinating," Lucca retorted. "I've been looking into artificial vestibular systems so I can build a robot able to maintain bipedal locomotion." Gato came the closest to success in that aspect, yet still wasn't satisfactory. That robot couldn't surmount any drastic incline (stairs, for instance) without toppling over, making it a real 'pushover' (as Crono would say, in his own special manner. She remembered throwing a boot at his head to get him to stop knocking the robot down while she was working on it.) Studying Robo's design had helped a great deal; she only needed to take the time to seriously apply that knowledge. She was just too easily distracted with too many ideas of late.

Bairith made a noise like clearing one's throat. 'Hrmn, yes, anyway, we're going to give new meaning to the term _center of gravity_. In fact, you're going to define your own in ways you never imagined. You can use the veins of darkness all around you—and even the ones inside you—to negatively channel the fluids of balance and maintain equilibrium no matter your orientation to the ground. Once you've mastered this, you'll be able to achieve perfect balance no matter where you are.'

Speaking of distractions, Lucca shuffled in place uncomfortably. "Uhh, talking about bodily fluids like this reminds me that I have to take a break."

'That isn't conducive to this lesson,' Bairith chided.

"Yeah, I _know_," Lucca said emphatically, giving him a hard look that glinted violet in the dark, and the rapier took a hint.

'Ahem, very well. Take a quick break.'

Lucca hurried around the corner and back into the shop while Barnath complained loudly, 'How do you humans get around, leaking constantly? Fleshbags, ugh.'

Five minutes later, after locking the shop back up again and returning to the thickest, darkest part of the alley, Bairith resumed his lecture.

'The most important attribute of the darkness to keep in mind is that it is nothing. It is neither matter nor magic, but in-between. You cannot push or pull it, only guide it. To possess it, you need only void your spirit and let it flow in, and the more darkness you have, the more you attract. So you see, it has a gravity of its own. A so-called field of darkness can put you at the center of your own gravity.'

Lucca mulled over the abstract physics of the idea. "Interesting in verse, I suppose, if pretty vague..."

'You'll see what I mean. Let's start. Take off your shoes again, close your eyes and get on your knees.'

"That just sounds wrong," she heard herself say in an echo of Liquel's voice.

'Just do it.'

"Okay, but I'm not falling for any creepy stuff." She brushed away a bottle cap before settling on a (mostly) clean spot.

Barnath snickered as his brother frowned. 'You've been listening to those perverted vagrants out here too long, you know that?'

"It's either them or you two," Lucca grumbled.

'Touché,' Bairith conceded, and then, without qualifying a thing, 'Do you know how to stand on your head?'

"What?"

'Well?'

Lucca fumbled for a response. "I... sheesh, I don't know. I haven't tried it since I was a little kid."

'Do it here, but before you do, recall our first lesson. Focus on the threads of darkness deep inside you and let them branch out until they surround you, like a bubble.'

"I don't know about this, but I'll try..." she uneasily agreed, only grateful that she was wearing her helmet. The pavement was cold, abrasive and slightly sticky, an inert stream of what she prayed was only soda snaking between her fingertips.

'Always know, always do, never try,' Bairith said, his placid confidence never faltering. 'Don't let any other thoughts or senses intervene.'

It was impossible not to feel ridiculous, attempting inept half-tumbles in the middle of a shady dump at ten o'clock at night, although if she was going to let a petty thing like self-consciousness stop her, Lucca would have walked away long before now. Bairith stood by, snipping at her for trying too hard and then not enough, until she wanted to stuff him in a trash bin and be done with it. At length she found his point, somewhere between the lines, and let go of the physical—the ground, the sky and every bottle cap in-between. She shut out the world and relaxed, watching her breath drift away on the pulse of something darker, no longer bound by the earth. _The darkness is nothing; it has no weight._

Her feet tingled with frostbite, her arms felt like rubber stilts and it smelled like her own sinuses were burning, yet when she opened her eyes Bairith was beaming at her from the underside, backwards and wrongways. 'There, you see? Beautiful equilibrium.'

"Ahhh... wow," she whispered, leery of breaking the trance. Across the street she could see a lamppost stabbing into the star-strewn ground from a sidewalk ceiling. "I'm doing it. I'm upside-down, but it feels like I'm right-side-up."

Barnath's sardonic voice came from behind her. 'You have no idea how stupid you two look.'

Lucca couldn't care less, at the moment. Giddy with her disoriented state and eager to go further, she gingerly pulled her hands off the ground and paddled her feet, treading the inside of her 'bubble of darkness' like walking on the belly of a cloud. She could feel something magnetic rippling beneath every step. "Heh... Not that this isn't cool and all, if pretty weird, but what's the point of this, again? What does this have anything to do with the blight?"

'I've told you before. The better your mastery of the darkness, the more resilient you'll become to its effects, including the blight.' Bairith archly wound around her elbow and down (up?) her back, tracing her spine with goosebumps. 'However, if you'd like a more novel application of tonight's lesson, we can give it a twist...'

"Oh, kay," she warily consented. "I'm game."

His voice carried on behind her ears and beneath her skin, 'Stay just as you are a moment. I'm going to help you this time. Close your eyes again and follow my directions, no matter how strange they may seem. Do not stop to consider whether or not it's possible, or you will lose your balance for certain.'

"Oh boy..."

'No groaning. Negative thoughts won't help. Ready?'

"Positive, Captain Smokey." A sense of humor (even a lame one) was her only crutch now, lest her dread take over—there was always an inkling of fear with the pain.

'Mmn-hmn,' Bairith barely humored the moniker. 'Put both your feet on the wall.'

It took a moment to remember which direction the walls were, especially now that she was considering an extra (inverted) axis. She slowly bent not-down-sideways until her toes touched the bricks, wavering on an invisible fulcrum, and then before she could look for her bearings Bairith instructed again, 'Now, start walking.'

Even as her feet moved, she felt like she wasn't going anywhere. With her eyes closed, she had only a disjointed, lighter-than-air sensation to guide her, and she was too caught up in her little weightless bubble to try to reach out with her extra senses.

'Good. Don't lose focus. Keep going... Stop here. Do you feel comfortable in your state of balance yet?'

"Yeah..." She swallowed a creaking note of uncertainty. The bricks felt as real and solid as she did, but that didn't necessarily mean anything anymore. "Yeah, I feel fine."

'Open your eyes, then.'

She suspected before she actually saw it—the lid of an upright trash bin, staring flatly back at her, and the ground spread like a dirty canvas behind it. She looked up, and there was the other wall. To the left the arrowhead planks of a fence were pointing her way, and to the right Barnath twisted in a knot, regarding her with a curious expression. Lucca laughed, choked, scoffed, and laughed again. "Whoa-ho-ho...!" She turned around, reeling at the open sky directly ahead. "I just walked right up the wall!"

Bairith appeared around her ankles, as if anchoring her to the mortar. 'You have. Neat, isn't it?'

"This is so bizarre...!" Lucca wandered a bit, leaving Bairith behind to explore the alley from a fresh angle. The whole world was sideways—it was strangely exhilarating. "Hahaha. This is fun!"

'Just be cautious; don't overdo it.'

She defiantly hopped in place, testing the false gravity that glued her feet to the bricks, and noticed Barnath flinching. 'Hey hey, watch it!'

"Hehehe. Relax, already! I think I've got this down pat!" She laughed again and twirled on one foot (suffering a scraped toe for her audacity, but it was worth it.)

She caught a look from Bairith, his hazy lips pursed sidelong in what could best pass for a frown. 'Be careful. You're pushing it.'

She kept walking higher, until she was standing sideways on the eaves. "I believe you underestimate me, good sir. I have this totally under control." Lift one leg, then the other, up and over—and then she was on the roof, pacing slanted across the steep shingles.

'Hey!' the alley barked up to her. 'Don't just take off!'

'Don't wander far, now.'

"Tch, I'm only having some fun! You guys are real sticks in the mud, you know that?"

'We're just looking out for you,' Bairith said, a sentiment she found hard to believe. "Huh, if you say so," Lucca huffed. She supposed she couldn't blame their reservations. This was a real, indomitable force of nature, and she was simply walking all over it. "You think I'm going to fall or something? I told you I can handle this!"

Walls and ledges once ponderous were now mere hurdles; Lucca never felt more free to roam anywhere, everywhere. She climbed over a hanging gutter, ran upside a second story house and jumped across a window box as if it were only a pothole. She couldn't let go just yet; she had to test this ability, as inchoate as it was, to see how far it could take her. Lucca was already imagining the possibilities—the impassable walls she could scale, the impenetrable fortresses she could waltz into... (She allowed her imagination to forget that she already knew a beast talent, something that could let her fly anywhere in world, since there was something more impressive about doing so without turning into a bird.)

"I bet I could walk right up the castle ramparts like this. Heheh, wouldn't Marle freak out if I just climbed in through her window one day? I am so trying that."

'Er, are you coming down yet?' Barnath caught up and peered at her worriedly from the street. His concern only irked her—since when did he care? "Yeah, yeah, in a minute! I'm not done yet." Lucca drummed her fingers on a jutting stovepipe and then skipped around to the other side of the building, where another back alley lay below.

Not too far ahead, she glimpsed a cart rolling down the open street, and Lucca thought better of getting spotted in the streetlight crawling up the walls like an overgrown spider. She stood up straight to survey her next oblique destination, somewhere with better cover, and brushed away some spots in the corner of her eye. Come to think of it, she was getting a little dizzy—just a little. Perhaps she should just... "Oh... ah..." Where was she going, again?

_'Lucca, get down.'_

A bolt of pain stung her leg, buckling her knees, and the perpendicular felt a little too real all of a sudden.

_'Lucca!'_

The ground came back very quickly.


End file.
